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AMD Phenom 9950 or Intel Q6600

up until recently would have been an easy decision (Q6600) but I think given the overclocking quaility of the more recent Q6600 its certainly not so black & white anymore... saying that you can pick up a quaility clocking Q6600 for under £100 atm in the MM and I would go 2nd hand on the Q6600 now as you can buy a known clockers and for sub £100 thats got to be a good buy
 
platinum87 said:
in most useful stuff AMD is faster clock for clock
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...when overclocked, not at stock.

The only real problem with AMD chips is the heat produced (which will be reduced on the 45nm variety) and the overclocking potential. I'm sure AMD will have made refinements to the chip by then and we have the newer southbridges becoming more common which should let the chip release it's full potential.

It's a better design than the Core 2 Quad IMO it's just been dogged by technical problems and crappy southbridges.

We'll see...
 
Some of you guys seem to be basing your incorrect opinion (or rather statements of apparent fact) on Phenom in its 9500/9600 guises.

Which is a bit like saying a Ferrari 599 is a bit ropey because the Dino wasn't quite up to much.

In other words: a bit silly.

Go and check out Anandtech and Techreport for a couple of examples of how the Q6600 does not outperform the 9850 (not the 9950) in every test. Not by a long way.

If the OP is not overclocking, then the Phenom will be the better performer. It will use more electricity (not that you'd notice, I suppose) but the platform will have slightly longer to run than Intel's LG775. If not overclocking, I'd get the 9950. If I were overclocking, I'd spend my money on an E2180 and a bucket-load of watercooling gubbins.
 
At stock, they're about the same.
The Phenom will be faster at 3.2Ghz, but...
the Intel is a lot easier to get to 3.2Ghz.
 
mrthingyx said:
It will use more electricity (not that you'd notice, I suppose)
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I do wonder if that's actually correct. Most of the Phenom's reputation for high power use comes from reviews that typically only look at what happens when the CPU is either idle or all four cores are fully loaded (where, admittedly it sucks amps rather harder then the Q6600).

But most quads spend a major chunk of their lives with, at best, just one core working at anything like full load. In that situation the Q6600 has to run all four cores at 2400MHz, while a Phenom 9950 will run core 0 at 2600MHz and cores 1,2 & 3 at (I think) 1300MHz because of its ability to vary each core clock individually.
 
The northbridge has other functions besides being a memory controller. In particular, it handles communications between the video card and the CPU (the southbridge doesn't have enough bandwidth for this.)
 
Mattus said:
The northbridge has other functions besides being a memory controller. In particular, it handles communications between the video card and the CPU (the southbridge doesn't have enough bandwidth for this.)
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To put it simply AMD mobo & X4 Phenom you will get 2 NB's the mobo NB & a CPU internal NB.
 
The correct answer to whether AMD chips have a North Bridge is technically, no. But it's not really that clear-cut.

A traditional NB contains five main functions - FSB interface, memory controller, PCIe bus host, PCI bus, and sometimes a proprietary bus for the South Bridge. It's the core of the system and there will only ever be one of them on a motherboard.

On AMD systems the FSB interface is not needed, the memory controller is moved into the CPU and the South Bridge uses the standard HyperTransport bus, so all that's needed is a kind of mini-NB that hooks up the HT bus and only contains the PCIe and PCI bus controllers. The technical name for that chip is 'PCIe/PCI tunnel'.

These things are not like a North Bridge, which is designed to do a specific task and work with a particular type of CPU. The PCIe/PCI tunnel is just a chip that converts traffic from HyperTransport to PCIe or PCI. You can have several of them in a system that needs lots of PCIe lanes, and even use them in non-x86 systems.

So they're not really a North Bridge, nor is the memory controller in AMD processors.
 
wheres the proof that OCing the phenoms results in a faster quad clock fro clock than an intel?

so both a 9950 and Q6600 at 3.2 or 3.3 or 3.4, you say the 9950 would be faster due to the fast L3?

wheres the proof?
 
The internet maybe?
Xtremesystems certainly has some decent benchmarks with overclocked Phenoms, as to if it's faster or not... I think that's a generalisation.
If it is faster it'd be by a miniscule amount, I'd be inclined to say it'd maybe match the intel at those clock speeds, that's with a greatly tweaked overclock on the AMD though.
 
Greatly tweaked? A number of them are just multiplier overclocks! :)

To be fair over 3GHz that L3 starts to really work hard, some great numbers start churning out of the Phenom, the OE 3GHz Phenom with 6MB L3 coming soon should be a strong contender, especially if the price point is right.
 
shaffaaf27 said:
i have searched but i got nothing. i still dont belive it till i see benches tbh.
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[FEED THE TROLL]
You must be really bad at using Google, then.
[/FEED THE TROLL]

This may satisfy your curiousity, as will a lot of stuff on that forum. The same website which a number of posts have referred to, already.

But I suppose my one, single, paltry example won't suffice as it's just one. But then, I'm linking to a particular post, not Google.

Try a search engine. Even MSN is actually pretty good, nowadays. ;)
 
Yep they are faster clock for clock but struggle to actually get the clocks as high as intels (obv).

I shall be upgrading my X2 5000 BE once they bring out a good clockah. Anyone know whens this is due? (if ever ;P) lol
 
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