A Real semi-decent PHENOM2 review..

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It seems like it's almost hanging with the i7's and its better than the q6600. Maybe if you OC'ed it a bit you could have a cpu almost equivelent to the i7's but probably for a lot cheaper.

They said 250-300 are going to otehr people soon so maybe more reviews will be popping up. So far it looks like amd is starting to get back in the game (finally)
 
i will wait for more credible sites to do reviews... why is this a "decent" review?
 
MrGuvernment said:
i will wait for more credible sites to do reviews... why is this a "decent" review?
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Noticed i put Semi-decent?

It may not be perfect, but its a good review compared to the other ones out there.

I mean they tested everything, not just PC games, which is something I am interested in.

So yes this is a Semi-decent review
 
Well, it finally does put AMD back in the game (in terms of competing with Core 2), but these should have been released 1 year ago.

In any case, I'll most likely be buying the 940 as long as its under $300. Gaming-wise there seems to be no difference between this and the Core i7 and it performs nicely at everything else.
 
DASHlT said:
http://66.102.9.104/translate_c?hl=...t=3189&usg=ALkJrhjKa9Cqlp9EHXNNndr9jMVUF3awdA

Translated of course.

Please Dan_D dont poop on this thread. This is an AMD forum ;)
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I'm not thread crapping, and I never thought I did in any of the AMD threads about Phenom II. My opinons aren't always popular, but they are just that, my opinons.

An interested read. Though the bad translation makes it difficult to get the full meaning of everything in the article.

Met-AL said:
PII means Pentium II the last time I checked.
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Yes it does. I'd like to see a better abreviation for Phenom II than "PII" as that will really confuse me. PHII isn't much better, but I'd prefer that over "PII." Us old school guys will probably have a hard time getting used to "PII" being used in a different context for a completely different CPU.

DASHlT said:
Noticed i put Semi-decent?

It may not be perfect, but its a good review compared to the other ones out there.

I mean they tested everything, not just PC games, which is something I am interested in.

So yes this is a Semi-decent review
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Still, there is a ton of synthetic testing which doesn't amount of a whole lot in terms of painting the overall picture of the CPUs performance.
 
Seems like the Phenom 2 performs about like a Q9XXX CPU based on the graphs. Somewhat better than a Q6XXX clock for clock.
 
Re your extremely childish title:

(1) Absolutely NO FLAMING, NAME CALLING OR PERSONAL ATTACKS. Mutual respect and civilized conversation is the required norm.
 
Okay so its a viable Q6600 alternative.
The question now is.... how will it scale and does it have a chance at becoming the best bang for the buck.

The Core i7 is very aggressively priced, but the Mobo and RAM kill the price package.
However, if those components come down in price, there is no doubt people will take the Core i7 route if their out for raw power.
 
Dan_D said:
I'm not thread crapping, and I never thought I did in any of the AMD threads about Phenom II. My opinons aren't always popular, but they are just that, my opinons.

An interested read. Though the bad translation makes it difficult to get the full meaning of everything in the article.



Yes it does. I'd like to see a better abreviation for Phenom II than "PII" as that will really confuse me. PHII isn't much better, but I'd prefer that over "PII." Us old school guys will probably have a hard time getting used to "PII" being used in a different context for a completely different CPU.


Still, there is a ton of synthetic testing which doesn't amount of a whole lot in terms of painting the overall picture of the CPUs performance.
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what about QPII?.. makes more sense then PII in my opinion.. drives me nuts since i as well come from the PI and PII era..

btw good review.. hard to read but the numbers are quite universal.. lets just hope more reviews match those same numbers..
 
Esstee said:
Okay so its a viable Q6600 alternative.
The question now is.... how will it scale and does it have a chance at becoming the best bang for the buck.

The Core i7 is very aggressively priced, but the Mobo and RAM kill the price package.
However, if those components come down in price, there is no doubt people will take the Core i7 route if their out for raw power.
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Yea I have to agree, bring those mobo and DDR3 prices down, and I would totally go i7 920.

But for performance/cost looks like the PII is the way to go
 
DASHlT said:
Yea I have to agree, bring those mobo and DDR3 prices down, and I would totally go i7 920.

But for performance/cost looks like the PII is the way to go
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We've already seen huge decreases in DDR3 pricing and will likely continue to see that as it gains in popularity. Motherboard pricing for Core i7 compatible motherboards is insane but this will change given time as well. As for Phenom II being the way to go for price vs. performance, I'm not so sure on that. We will have to wait for more performance numbers and of course, overclocking information before I can really agree or disagree with that statement. If the performance of Phenom II ends up where I think it will, it will supplant the Q6600 as the price/performance king, and we'll have to wait and see if Intel will drop the price of any of its 45nm quad cores into the Phenom II's price bracket then make the comparison then. I suspect Intel will do just that making the choice more difficult.
 
The Phenom I is lacking from that review, making it less than ideal.
 
Atech said:
The Phenom I is lacking from that review, making it less than ideal.
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phenom I wouldnt even fit on any of those graphs.. thats how bad it is even compared to the q6600.. im glad i decided to wait for the phenom II.. almost bit the bullet a few months ago to buy a 9950 but changed my mind right at the last minute..


Esstee said:
Okay so its a viable Q6600 alternative.
The question now is.... how will it scale and does it have a chance at becoming the best bang for the buck.

The Core i7 is very aggressively priced, but the Mobo and RAM kill the price package.
However, if those components come down in price, there is no doubt people will take the Core i7 route if their out for raw power.
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is it just me or does the intel i7 feel like a copy cat of the iphone 3g and AT&T.. iphone 3g is dirt cheap compared to the old one.. only difference is the plan costs 3 times as much as the old iphone.. :p
 
PhII sounds good to me ^_^

Interesting benchmark results... obviously the PhII can't get even close to i7 at this point, but on the other hand it makes the Q2D CPUs look like old news. Since Intel CPUs are relatively expensive here in Europe, that might mean that it'd be far more cost-effective for my company to go with AMD's PhII next year than an Intel-based solution.
 
Ouc the only task i do which requires a lot of computing power is gaming.
If this test is true then no AMD for me as it wasn't even able to pass Q9550 even once :(
And with 790 GX mobos at prices similar to P45 ones there's no real advantage for going there.
Or I might just as well get Q6600 and put it into mobo I already have for 50% of price of new phenom+mobo :(
 
I admit I haven't read the whole review, but I didn't see any info on what memory speed/timings they used (not visible in the setup/configuration page at least). Without that kind of vital information it's hard to say it's even a semi-decent review.:rolleyes:

If I'm blind and missed these details, please let me know.

PS: PII is a good name, it's quite hard to confuse 10++ year old CPUs with a brand new one in a discussion lol.
 
knopflerbruce said:
I admit I haven't read the whole review, but I didn't see any info on what memory speed/timings they used (not visible in the setup/configuration page at least). Without that kind of vital information it's hard to say it's even a semi-decent review.:rolleyes:

If I'm blind and missed these details, please let me know.

PS: PII is a good name, it's quite hard to confuse 10++ year old CPUs with a brand new one in a discussion lol.
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PII is and will always be Pentium II for me and a lot of other people.
 
knopflerbruce said:
PS: PII is a good name, it's quite hard to confuse 10++ year old CPUs with a brand new one in a discussion lol.
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No, it really isn't. To me it will always be "Pentium II" which was abreviated by "PII", just as the "Pentium III" was "PIII" and "Pentium 4" was "P4." Phenom needs to be "Ph2" or something like that.
 
Dan_D said:
We've already seen huge decreases in DDR3 pricing and will likely continue to see that as it gains in popularity. Motherboard pricing for Core i7 compatible motherboards is insane but this will change given time as well. As for Phenom II being the way to go for price vs. performance, I'm not so sure on that. We will have to wait for more performance numbers and of course, overclocking information before I can really agree or disagree with that statement. If the performance of Phenom II ends up where I think it will, it will supplant the Q6600 as the price/performance king, and we'll have to wait and see if Intel will drop the price of any of its 45nm quad cores into the Phenom II's price bracket then make the comparison then. I suspect Intel will do just that making the choice more difficult.
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Dan,

Good points all. I am absolutely sure Intel will drop their prices to compete, they have the margin to do so without losing money.

That said (and agreed upon) those who previously tried to argue that competition doesn't cause Intel to keep their prices reasonable just choked on their words.

As for the q6600 competing, that is only true to a point. Cores are cores and DO make a difference in many applications. Just the fact that it will run one app "equally" doesn't mean it will run all equally, or even that it will run many at the same time equally. I am sure that you all watch the Tom's Hardware CPU comparison charts. Click around between the bench marked apps and watch the CPUs swap places.

It is easy to say a faster dual core is "better" than a slower quad core but in many MANY cases that is simply not true. In my business for example I am using 3DFTP to upload files to client sites, running SQL Server queries, and importing CSV files into SQL Server, all at the same time. Lots of people want to do things simultaneously, and cores have lower overhead (by a LOT) than OS core multi-tasking.

WHEN DDR3 RAM achieves price parity with DDR2 (and it will happen, but not "soon") and WHEN i7 motherboards drop to parity with AMD solution then i7 will be a KILLER. I would be there now if the "combination" price wasn't so high.

I have read with interest though how the virtual cores can cause cache thrashing which actually makes performance worse rather than better. This is something that needs to be addressed by the OS such that the end user doesn't have to worry about it. There are plenty of applications (Firefox, Word, Excel?) that could be loaded into the virtual cores, where they wouldn't thrash the cache, but preventing other things (SQL Server) from utilizing the virtual cores because they very often would cause cache thrashing. This would imply Intel somehow publishing the fact that a core is virtual or real and allowing the OS to make active decisions at the application level whether to use those virtual cores for a given application.

Virtual cores are an area that AMD really should attempt to implement.

And finally, you have made comments that the "benefit" will be 10% +/-, but that isn't true because of the clock speed "room". The older Phenoms absolutely were limited to what you could get out of them, i.e. they were sold already clocked close to the max, and that max was pretty low. I bought upgrades to my older X2, replacing them with 9600s. They just wouldn't reliably go over 2.4 or so, no matter what I tried. These new ones will drop in at 3.0 and with a little fussing should easily get to 3.5. The difference between 2.4 and 3.5 is much more than 10%. And the real point here is that I already have servers in place, running AMD motherboards, OS installed, SQL Server installed, etc all able to just drop in a new chip and get an instant 30% speed increase, maybe with luck even more. My "cost" to get that speed increase will be (estimated of course) about $250 each, on a total existing system cost in the thousands. That is a good investment.

Sure, for a new system build, a new price performance evaluation has to be done, but there is no way I will be building new systems any time soon just to go Intel, even if I could get a 25% speed increase (over a new Phenom II). The cost is even more than the cost of the combination, it is also the cost of the man hours involved in doing it all.
 
You could sell the masses a revised PII core (imagine one at 45 nm and clocked at 1 GHz or so ;) ), and they wouldn't notice the difference :D
 
Elledan said:
You could sell the masses a revised PII core (imagine one at 45 nm and clocked at 1 GHz or so ;) ), and they wouldn't notice the difference :D
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Sad part...you might actually be right...90% of PC's user would never be in the know there...scary ;)
 
Atech said:
Sad part...you might actually be right...90% of PC's user would never be in the know there...scary ;)
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And you know what's funny/sad? The Atom CPU is closer to the Pentium II design than modern CPUs. Sure, they tacked on hyperthreading and such, but they kept it very basic. Kind of interesting, I thought ^_^
 
Elledan said:
And you know what's funny/sad? The Atom CPU is closer to the Pentium II design than modern CPUs. Sure, they tacked on hyperthreading and such, but they kept it very basic. Kind of interesting, I thought ^_^
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merom and nehalem are much closer to the pentium 2 than atom is.... atom is more like a cleaned up, modernized pentium 1....

and yea... im pretty sure the "masses" (wtf does that even mean anyway?) would identify the PII/P2 as pentium 2... thats how its been for the better part of a decade, and thats how it was when we all ran through black mesa crowbar-ing the shit out of headcrabs for the first time way back when
 
Okay, Pentium 1 :) I just remember from the dissection articles I read that Atom is very basic, much like the Pentium something very old or other.

My vote for PhII, or Ph2 still stands.
 
atom seems to perform about like a northwood clock for clock so i figured it was a 45nm northie. guess I was wrong.

pII still points to pentium II in my head too! why not just deneb or k10.5. It can join the barcy, yorky, etc... same number of keys to press if laziness is the goal here (no shift required).
 
The thing that gets me is. You guys in this thread, and tell me PII stands for a pentium. You know maybe 10+ years ago did, but this is a new century for cryin out loud, if it bothers you that much dont read the topic. I mean if someone posts (Semi-decent PII review) in a AMD forum, you guys just have to come here from your intel forum to complain about the title? I mean its pretty petty thing to do. But then you complain about my title that you guys were crying?....If you dont like the reference PII then I am sorry, But this is a new day and age and the INTEL PII is old news. (And before you come in here well back 10 years ago when i was into pc's blah blah crap. I have been around just as long if not longer. My first damn system was a Celeron 300A which I had overclocked faster then a INTEL PI).

Anyway Stop comin on this thread to crap on AMD new chip. It's nice they finally get this thing out. And yes maybe it sucks compared to a i7. But who cares?...Some people dont want to waste alot of cash on those systems. Not everyone has money in there pocket like DAN_D with his i7 and Tri-SLI.

All we can do is afford what is the best/price Ratio of what we have. Not everyone wants to buy a new mobo/ram just for 1 CPU. It is a nice thing that these new PII work with AM2 Mobos.

Either way This is a semi-decent Review. Better then anywhere else on the net currently. So lets not crap on it because if doesnt live up to Your Intel Standards (which BTW that review shows just how damn good the i7 is)

Thanks
Shitty
 
DASHlT said:
The thing that gets me is. You guys in this thread, and tell me PII stands for a pentium. You know maybe 10+ years ago did, but this is a new century for cryin out loud, if it bothers you that much dont read the topic. I mean if someone posts (Semi-decent PII review) in a AMD forum, you guys just have to come here from your intel forum to complain about the title? I mean its pretty petty thing to do. But then you complain about my title that you guys were crying?....If you dont like the reference PII then I am sorry, But this is a new day and age and the INTEL PII is old news. (And before you come in here well back 10 years ago when i was into pc's blah blah crap. I have been around just as long if not longer. My first damn system was a Celeron 300A which I had overclocked faster then a INTEL PI).

Anyway Stop comin on this thread to crap on AMD new chip. It's nice they finally get this thing out. And yes maybe it sucks compared to a i7. But who cares?...Some people dont want to waste alot of cash on those systems. Not everyone has money in there pocket like DAN_D with his i7 and Tri-SLI.

All we can do is afford what is the best/price Ratio of what we have. Not everyone wants to buy a new mobo/ram just for 1 CPU. It is a nice thing that these new PII work with AM2 Mobos.

Either way This is a semi-decent Review. Better then anywhere else on the net currently. So lets not crap on it because if doesnt live up to Your Intel Standards (which BTW that review shows just how damn good the i7 is)

Thanks
Shitty
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This right here guys is what happens when someone develops an emotional attachment to a brand. They start claiming turf such as in this case "AMD forum" and us Intel guys are babies for pointing out his rediculous calling of a Phenom 2 the PII. Get a clue and get a grasp on reality.

By the way Dashit.. I have 5 PC's sitting here running, ONE of them is a Intel E8400 and the others are all AMD machines.. Duron 750, XP Mobile Barton 2500, X2 4200, Turion 64. Does that allow me to post in your forum?

And for pete's sake, its a peice of hardware, from a company, that is now partially owned by Arabs, that is nothing more than a business, and doesn't care what nice things you claim about their products.
 
It's a fairly decent review, but much the same as we have seen already. Retail chips O/C'ing headroom will be the determining factor for how attractive these PhII's will be. The i7 systems had 3GB RAM while the C2Q and PhII's only 2GB. Not sure how much that came into play in the final benches.
 
Met-AL said:
This right here guys is what happens when someone develops an emotional attachment to a brand. They start claiming turf such as in this case "AMD forum" and us Intel guys are babies for pointing out his rediculous calling of a Phenom 2 the PII. Get a clue and get a grasp on reality.

By the way Dashit.. I have 5 PC's sitting here running, ONE of them is a Intel E8400 and the others are all AMD machines.. Duron 750, XP Mobile Barton 2500, X2 4200, Turion 64. Does that allow me to post in your forum?

And for pete's sake, its a peice of hardware, from a company, that is now partially owned by Arabs, that is nothing more than a business, and doesn't care what nice things you claim about their products.
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+1

P2 was always pentium 2, has been for 10 years, and will be for a while yet.... why? the p2 was a *great* cpu series... and during the 1998/1999 gaming seasons (the two best *ever*), it was the CPU of choice
 
Met-AL said:
This right here guys is what happens when someone develops an emotional attachment to a brand. They start claiming turf such as in this case "AMD forum" and us Intel guys are babies for pointing out his rediculous calling of a Phenom 2 the PII. Get a clue and get a grasp on reality.

By the way Dashit.. I have 5 PC's sitting here running, ONE of them is a Intel E8400 and the others are all AMD machines.. Duron 750, XP Mobile Barton 2500, X2 4200, Turion 64. Does that allow me to post in your forum?

And for pete's sake, its a peice of hardware, from a company, that is now partially owned by Arabs, that is nothing more than a business, and doesn't care what nice things you claim about their products.
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I don't currently own any AMD processor based machines, but I have owned my fair share of them:

AMD 486 DX2 66
AMD 486 DX4 100
AMD K6
AMD K6 2
AMD Athlon (Thunderbird) 1.0GHz
AMD Athlon (Thunderbird) 1.2GHz
AMD Athlon (Thunderbird) 1.3GHz
AMD Athlon XP 3200+
AMD Athlon 64 3800+ (130nm)
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (90nm)
AMD Opteron 246 x2
AMD Opteron 254 x2

I haven't had any AMD processors since the AMD Opteron 254 system I ran. I saw no reason to switch from my Opteron setup to the X2 as it was more or less a lateral move. Since the Core 2 Duo came out, I've been strictly Intel. However whether you have owned an AMD processor or not, there is nothing wrong with healthy discussions about the products in the forum.
 
alg7_munif said:
Did Intel ever trademark Pentium II as P2 or PII?
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I don't think they ever trade marked it, but the standard abreviation for it back in the day was PII. The correct spelling of the processor's name was "Pentium II." It wasn't until the Pentium 4 came around that the Roman Numerals were dropped in favor of standard alpha numeric numbering.
 
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