Is the phenom 2 worth it?

reflux · 26 Jul 2009 at 15:52

dmxdex2020 said:
From the review i look above the phenom 2 competes very well so a saving of over 60 sounds good to me.

It competes in gaming but i7 wins in nearly everything else. That's what you've got to look at here - i7 is a processor primarily designed for multithreaded applications, taking things to the next level.

Phenom 2 was designed to compete with Core 2, not i7 and that's how things end up in the marketplace. People buying a high end rig go with i7, because it's the best. Personally, I don't think a saving of £60 is worth bothering with. If it was £100 or so, then maybe. But it's not a lot, given that AMD is supposed to be the budget option.

I'm not knocking the Phenom 2s, because they are great processors and it's wonderful to see AMD returning to form after so long in the wilderness. But there is a reason why I spunked big bucks on my parts and didn't get a Phenom 2. It would have only been as fast as my old Yorkfield setup.

If, as you've stated, you want a PC for gaming and internet usage, you may as well get a Phenom as there ain't much in it for those uses.

The MSI 790FX-GD70 is indeed an excellent choice for a motherboard.

dmxdex2020 · 26 Jul 2009 at 15:56

reflux said:
It competes in gaming but i7 wins in nearly everything else. That's what you've got to look at here - i7 is a processor primarily designed for multithreaded applications, taking things to the next level.

Phenom 2 was designed to compete with Core 2, not i7 and that's how things end up in the marketplace. People buying a high end rig go with i7, because it's the best. Personally, I don't think a saving of £60 is worth bothering with. If it was £100 or so, then maybe. But it's not a lot, given that AMD is supposed to be the budget option.

I'm not knocking the Phenom 2s, because they are great processors and it's wonderful to see AMD returning to form after so long in the wilderness. But there is a reason why I spunked big bucks on my parts and didn't get a Phenom 2. It would have only been as fast as my old Yorkfield setup.

If, as you've stated, you want a PC for gaming and internet usage, you may as well get a Phenom as there ain't much in it for those uses.

The MSI 790FX-GD70 is indeed an excellent choice for a motherboard, and certainly what I'd go for in your situation.

lol im gonna have to have a big decision, i will be buying windows 7 and i will have apps running in background aswell, decision decisions.

Rroff · 26 Jul 2009 at 16:01

Final8y said:
snip

Someone please show me a 4gig I7 against a 4gig 955 - with the i7 running a proper memory config not some crippled setup...

if the PII is seriously such a contender why are all the reviews so skewed on clock speed, etc.

Sylver123 · 26 Jul 2009 at 16:37

@dmxdex2020

If it's only really gaming and the internet you`ll be using you computer for, then go AMD Phenom II, as there`s no
point spending the extra money on Core i7 if you`ll not be using the chip for anything else.

Zerolimitz · 26 Jul 2009 at 16:40

honestly if your going just for gaming get the amd they perform almost or the same as the i7 there aint a big diff not to mention amd make great value for money and well you get a nice gaming system on the cheap i would rather go for amd now and see what the future holds and then maybe fork out the extra ££. keep in mind this is gaming only when it comes to other things well intel beats amd hands down

Sylver123 · 26 Jul 2009 at 16:42

Zerolimitz said:
honestly if your going just for gaming get the amd they perform almost or the same as the i7 there aint a big diff not to mention amd make great value for money and well you get a nice gaming system on the cheap i would rather go for amd now and see what the future holds and then maybe fork out the extra ££. keep in mind this is gaming only when it comes to other things well intel beats amd hands down

Exactly.

'Wes · 26 Jul 2009 at 17:34

I purchased an AMD-ATI system yesterday for the very first time and my reason for giving AMD and ATI a go was because of the following.

The benchmark results i was seeing on Anandtech, Bit-Tech and other websites was impressive, especially for the price AMD and ATI hardware has been labelled at. It gave me the reason to believe that i just didn't see any reason to pay extra cash for an Intel-Nvidia system when AMD and ATI appear to get the job done at a cheaper cost and sometimes even succeeding in beating Intel and Nvidia in certain scenario's.

I look forward to the day it arrives.

Final8y · 26 Jul 2009 at 17:50

Rroff said:
Someone please show me a 4gig I7 against a 4gig 955 - with the i7 running a proper memory config not some crippled setup...

if the PII is seriously such a contender why are all the reviews so skewed on clock speed, etc.

You should ignore the benches of the PII at 4Ghz like everyone else in comparison to the i7 as there are other clock speeds on display in the same benches.

'Wes · 26 Jul 2009 at 18:26

A 4Ghz Intel Core i7 vs a 4Ghz AMD Phenom II X4 955 is irrelevant. Benchmarks are done at stock speeds for a reason and the setups they use are relatively the same except for memory, the motherboard and possibly other bits of hardware, it also creates a certain truth factor as well keeping both systems at stock speeds.

I tend to look at the manufacturers websites to compare both processors, you usually can tell from there.

Nelly · 26 Jul 2009 at 19:01

Well here is a review of the AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition which does show comparisons with the i7 920.

In gaming on Crysis the AMD X4 955BE @ 3.2Ghz is 1fps slower than the Intel i7 920 @ 2.67GHz but with Farcry 2 the AMD X4 955BE is 10fps faster at same speeds.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2009/04/23/amd-phenom-ii-x4-955-black-edition-cpu-am3/7

If you look at the video encoding results these are at stock the Intel i7 920 @ 2.67GHz is around 20 seconds faster than the AMD X4 955BE @ 3.2GHz taking around 9 minutes to do on average for both to complete.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2009/04/23/amd-phenom-ii-x4-955-black-edition-cpu-am3/8

The annoying thing about any of these reviews we see is they always use stock speeds, it would be better if they clocked the i7 920 to 3.2GHz or both CPU's to 3.6GHz or 3.8GHz to give a more accurate picture at what gives the better benefits

It's safe to assume the i7 920 owns the X4 955BE in video encoding/Image editing/File compression, but with gaming it's another story.

What we need is comparisons at the same clock speeds, 3.6GHz would be a good start as that is easy to clock on the AMD X4 955BE.

The i7 920 will clock to 4GHz easily I've had mine at 4.2GHz when I was running mine, the AMD X4 955BE can run at 3.6GHz no problem & 3.8GHz is doable with more tweaking involved to run stable.

Rroff · 26 Jul 2009 at 19:09

I'd love to see some clock for clock benchmarks at 3.8gig by someone competent

Of all the benchmarks I've seen so far 75% have been skewed to make AMD look good and the other 25% skewed to make intel look good with nothing in between.

Nelly · 26 Jul 2009 at 19:13

Rroff said:
Of all the benchmarks I've seen so far 75% have been skewed to make AMD look good and the other 25% skewed to make intel look good with nothing in between.

It's just plain dumbness on the reviewer sites part, but I guess their thinking is people buy computers that run at stock speeds, I'm guessing theirs a hell of a lot more people running stock than people like us overclocking, we are a small minority.

Fully agree though, I could do some benches but would be nice if someone with a GTX295 could run some on their i7 920 @ 3.6GHz / 3.8GHz.

I've actually dropped mine back to stock, as it's good enough for any game I play inc Crysis running 54fps @ 3.2GHz @ 1900x1200 resolution all on max settings.

Final8y · 26 Jul 2009 at 19:17

Im also running at stock ATM.

Rapido! · 26 Jul 2009 at 19:17

Final8y said:
Exactly.
And from the very first reviews the same was said that the i7 is not a real improvement in gaming but there are some here claiming otherwise.

Hey look! i7 utterly slaughtering Phenom II in gaming performance (Resident Evil 5)

Hey look! i7 utterly slaughtering Phenom II in gaming performance (Arma II)

They might be equals when it comes to the running of older games, but what's becoming apparent is that benchmarks of truly multi-threaded titles are more and more showing i7 to be the clearly superior architecture.

This is happening, and you should probably come to terms with it.

PermaBanned · 26 Jul 2009 at 19:28

dmxdex2020 said:
The socket is not my factor i want long lasting and a top quad core processor for gaming and new games that will be quad core.

The crosshair asus board cannot reach higher ram speeds than the msi board.

Can't reach higher RAM speeds? You mean it can't support faster RAM? I'm going to let you in on a secret: You only need 800MHz RAM. Anything over that really is extra. Too much over that is overpriced and overkill. Anything under that is still usable, hell, i'm running 336MHz RAM at the minute and it doesn't do me any harm.

But the crosshair motherboard is fantastic build quality, it just oozes quality from every seam. The reviews are fantastic and it comes with thousands of features and extras that are perfect for starting you off. You're paying less for more.

EDIT) Wait, the MSI board is cheaper, isn't it? Definitely go for that then

gareth170 · 26 Jul 2009 at 19:48

theres a very small % of people that do overclock. i think most people forget this tbh.

Rroff · 26 Jul 2009 at 19:52

gareth170 said:
theres a very small % of people that do overclock. i think most people forget this tbh.

this is overclockers

Nelly · 26 Jul 2009 at 19:57

Rapido! said:
Hey look! i7 utterly slaughtering Phenom II in gaming performance (Resident Evil 5)

Hey look! i7 utterly slaughtering Phenom II in gaming performance (Arma II)

They might be equals when it comes to the running of older games, but what's becoming apparent is that benchmarks of truly multi-threaded titles are more and more showing i7 to be the clearly superior architecture.

This is happening, and you should probably come to terms with it.

Hell this sucks only 80fps with a crappy HD4890 on Resident Evil 5 on the AMD X4 955BE, my cpu sucks

/sarcasm off

They should have done the test on the fastest Graphics Card also the reviewers did state this:

AMD's second generation Phenom CPUs are a little problematic though: An X4 955 BE overclocked to 3.5 GHz is 700 MHz (equal 25 percent) faster than an X4 920 (4x 2.8 GHz) but reaches only 1.1 frames per second more than the smaller CPU - thus the fastest Phenom II is still much slower than the C2Q Q9650. When rechecking the system with Cinebench R10 and Far Cry 2 we received the common, plausible results - the overclcoked X4 955 Be was more than 20 percent faster than the X4 920. Therefore we estimate that the abnormal behavior of the Phenom II CPUs is related to an incompatibility of ArmA 2. Possibly this problem (and several others) are fixed with patches.

gareth170 · 26 Jul 2009 at 19:58

Rroff said:
this is overclockers

so..

its just the name. doesn't mean that everybody buys products from here will overclock / must overclock

Nelly · 26 Jul 2009 at 20:00

gareth170 said:
so..

its just the name. doesn't mean that everybody buys products from here will overclock / must overclock

I agree, I would bet a million quid their is more people buying products from overclockers that dont overclock at all than their are people that overclock - impossible to prove unfortunatly.

Same goes for any other non online retailor as well as online retailors.