E4500 or Phenom 9600?

[CoRPS]

I'm putting together a system on newegg. And it will cost me about $15 more to go from E4500 to Phenom 9600. I have only a day or so to decide. Which should I do? I mean at first glance going quad core would be ideal, but I've heard bad things about Phenom and AM2+ in general.

Ideas?

 

[rxteenager]

well the new b3 stepping for the phenom is supposed to be out which fixed the whole cache problems. I would go quad. But I guess there's not real way to guarantee that you wouldn't get one of the old messed up phenoms.

dude you got your math all messed up, the e4500 is 114, and the phenom is 179, that's more than a 15$ difference . hehe just wanted to point that out. Unless you got like a super saver coupon or something.

 

[RamonGTP]

I was at Fry's today and they had a deal for a Phenom+mobo for $179. I thought about it as a cheap quad core rig to replace my e4500 but decided against it. I have my e4500 running at 3GHz on stock cooling with no problems at all and if I wanted to go quad, I'd be better served simply getting a Q6600 and slapping it into this board, then OCing that to 3GHz.

In the end it simply came down to me being bored and wanting to play with new toys. Wasn't really needed as I've already got a Q6600 as my main rig and the e4500 is doing quite well as a secondary machine.

 

[CoRPS]

The E4500 is $114 and a Lian Li was $100ish = $214.00
The combo is a Phenom 9600 and a Antec case for $239.00

 

[oldpablo]

Do you overclock or not? Do you do heavy multitasking to utilize quad cores or not? Does this rig need to last you a long time? Those answers will tell you which way to go.

 

[RamonGTP]

Do you already have the e4500 or not?

 

[Vengance_01]

What motherboard? If its a P35? the E4500 is the better deal. Should be good for 3.2-3.6 which will be better then the Quad 9600. Plus P35 will leave you a better upgrade path.

 

[DrFreeze]

But I guess there's not real way to guarantee that you wouldn't get one of the old messed up phenoms.

the 9600 is B2, the 9650 is B3

iirc all B3 stepping phenoms are xx50's instead of xx00's, so its dead simple to sidestep the TLB-bug

B3's might be more expensive just for this reason though, people might be trying to dump the B2's. Too bad my secondary (am2) rig wont accept a phenom, or i might hunt for a cheap 9500, and just biosfix it

 

[RamonGTP]

If you go with a B2, I wouldn't recommend applying the bios fix unless you think you may run into a usage scenario that would exploit the bug. Reason being is that there is a pretty significant performance penalty for the "fix" and at times it could be a VERY significant penelty, especially for compression/decompression of files. I wouldn't be surprised to see some drastic price cuts on existing B2's very soon to clear out their inventory.

 

[CoRPS]

Mostly just playing games, photoshop, thinking about doing some maya or 3dsmax.

 

[oldpablo]

I highly doubt you ever hit that bug. I have yet to see anyone anywhere online that has hit it, including people doing heavy stress testing like [H]. I'd personally consider it a non-issue.

 

[Ocellaris]

I highly doubt you ever hit that bug. I have yet to see anyone anywhere online that has hit it, including people doing heavy stress testing like [H]. I'd personally consider it a non-issue.

Its easy to say its a non-issue, however now the TLB fix gets forced on people via Vista SP1 regardless of your BIOS settings. There are work around fixes to re-disable it, however its just another potential issue that may come up later, and just gives a user more hoops to jump through, and a harder to work around fix may be introduced later.

The fix does not appear to be in XP SP3, however a Quad Core CPU purchased today is likely to be usable past the end of XP's life.