AMD Athlon II X2 / Phenom II X2 And Low-Power CPU Bonanza

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"550 BE is strong enough to earn a nod" Careful now. Your Intel sponsors might get angry. But at least I can say very well done AMD. Both new processors are solid performers.
 
Am I the only one wondering why an 705e with 3 cores uses 23W MORE than an 905e with 4 cores, all of them running at the same frequency?

Looks like those numbers are messed up.
 
AMD shouldn't change how cores in Phenom II run at different speed. I run my Phenom 9850 at CnQ speed most of the time with all cores at 1.25GHz. Combined with an Nvidia Geforce 8200 board, it idles at 80W. When I game, I manually put Vista's power option at performance. On MSI board, Phenom will only run at full speed.

One of the most interesting feature of old Phenom is that you can change the number of cores used by Vista, by changing advanced boot option in msconfig. That way, one can overclock the rest of the cores to higher clock speed with lower voltage. Not sure if that works for Phenom II.
 
it would be bette for AMD to supply a driver for M$ beta software that handles the low power states correctly and let the other proper operating systems work as intended? I hope that most board manufacturers will leave this as a toggle bios option.

on the other hand, I can't wait for the 2 other releases next month. I put my latest PC buy on hold just to wait how the situation settles. however it looks it's getting better and better for my price range (HD4770, the new AMD dual cores). just a proper micro-atx am3 mobo and I am set (can only see the lanparty jr in my corner of the woods, and I don't need a CF/SLI capable mobo).
 
[citation][nom]ohim[/nom]Is is me or iTunes shouldn`t be used as a benchmark since it`s beeing developed by apple wich uses only Intel CPU`s, and lame audio encoding ... i mean look at the other 2 multimedia programs used and look at those 2.[/citation]

Since Apple sells Ipods to PC users I would assume they are aware that many people will be using AMD CPU's and program for it accordingly. The benchmarks seem pretty consistent besides the Itunes (E6300 beating Q8400) as the Q8400 wins every single round (at times not by much). That said, these new chips from AMD look pretty kickass.
 
I do like AMD as a company, but they fail to one extent atleast.

I thought their orignal naming scheme was horrid...
Now you have made it worse.
Having Athlon dual core, Athlon II x2, Phenom II x2, and now emerging Athlon II x3/x4.
This is very confusing for the consumer.
 
Double post because I can.

Interest article, thank you.

It would be very nice to see a low power gaming build. :)
Efficient Micro-ATX motherboard, silent efficient cooling, phenom II x4 905e (at stock clocks, but undervolted even further), ATi 4770, WD 1TB green HDD, some good ddr2 that can hold 1066 while accepting possibly a voltage decrease.
Something cool, quiet, (hopefully, with the undervolting) stable, and cheap that can still blaze most modern games.

How well do these chips undervolt while remaining stable at stock clock speeds? Reading the recent SBM, it seemed the i7 920 could handle a significant undervolt while taking a good overclock at the same time.

A completely silent PC without the need for an expensive water cooling setup sounds amazing. Something that would actually be in my price range.
 
What amd need to do is release 1 to 2 competing processors a year then focus on the low end market. They need to restore confidence in their buyers. I want to see a chip that can beat the Atom in the netbook market and a chip that will beat the i7. right now it seems like they are two steps from becoming bankrupt.
 
Recycling names... how horrible... Time to put my old E6300 on ebay? Why not call it an E6350 (after the E6320 which had a 4MB cache), like the horrible mess which is their mobile line. Makes the E7400 even more pointless in the first place. The new E6300 apparently does support virtualization... which I want, but I don't want to spend $160 to get. So, I'm going from a E6300, a processor I bought 3 years ago) to an E7300 back to an E6300 now, beautiful!
 
Good article, but I'm sad that the Phenom II architecture can't beat a wolfdale when clocked comparably. Scale the 2.8 up to 3.1 in your head and I see no reasonable improvement other than DDR-3.

I am glad this is an option, seeing as I'm building an AM3 rig next and would like a cheaper CPU to tide me over til I can afford a black box X4, but my year old E8400 is still running quite well and cool at 3.8.

To the author, and slightly off-topic, what happened to the 4770? That was my crossfire setup!
 
[citation][nom]Ramar[/nom]Good article, but I'm sad that the Phenom II architecture can't beat a wolfdale when clocked comparably. Scale the 2.8 up to 3.1 in your head and I see no reasonable improvement other than DDR-3.I am glad this is an option, seeing as I'm building an AM3 rig next and would like a cheaper CPU to tide me over til I can afford a black box X4, but my year old E8400 is still running quite well and cool at 3.8.To the author, and slightly off-topic, what happened to the 4770? That was my crossfire setup![/citation]

Hi Ramar,

ATI is having some serious issues meeting demand right now, according to the company. In reality, there is demand, but yields at 40nm are rumored to be low. As a result, sites like Newegg, Tiger, Buy, etc, are de-listing the board completely (likely until they have sufficient quantity to sell).
 
The encoding time difference between the 550 and the 250 is somewhat hard to digest. Just see the massive difference for a 100MHz diff in clock. And we all know over the years that media encoding is indifferent to cache sizes, even in Intel CPUs. Is there something else at play here? I saw in AnandTech that the C1E state of the 250 led to lower performance because of poor BIOS support of the same. Maybe when the 250's bios code gets updated, we'll see better performance.
 
Interesting ... except for the synthetic benchmarks.

Open Question: does anyone actually look at the synthetic benchmarks or do you feel that they are as useful to you as a bicycle is to a fish?

Personally, for a CPU or graphics-card review, I always skip straight over them - theoretical performance is of no interest to me when real-world figures are also provided. Perhaps we could reduce the workload at Toms if no one else looks at them either?

Hence, feel free to "vote" on this by using
* "thumbs up" to indicate that synthetic benchmarks can be dropped (or significantly reduced) when there are real-world benchmarks provided; or
* "thumbs down" to indicate "I LOVE SYNTHETIC BENCHMARKS YOU SILLY GIT".
 
AMD needs to better managed. Right now they need to focus on Athlon II as much as possible and position it is a competitor to C2D. come out with Athlon II x2, x3, x4 and screw support for AM2+. This will should be thir main focus area.

Second they should focus on the mobile market. If they had released a stars core based CPU their it would have been extremely competitive.

They should learn from their Phenom/PhenomII mistakes, analyze Core i7 and try to come up with something comeptitive to replace PII as soon as possible. The higher-end is only good for the server market(and the enthusiast PC) but not their brand recognition is enough wherein they can compete for the mass market.
 
[citation][nom]Anaon[/nom]AMD needs to better managed. Right now they need to focus on Athlon II as much as possible and position it is a competitor to C2D. come out with Athlon II x2, x3, x4 and screw support for AM2+. This will should be thir main focus area.Second they should focus on the mobile market. If they had released a stars core based CPU their it would have been extremely competitive.They should learn from their Phenom/PhenomII mistakes, analyze Core i7 and try to come up with something comeptitive to replace PII as soon as possible. The higher-end is only good for the server market(and the enthusiast PC)[/citation]
hey man, for the time being, alot of us have AM2+ cpu's/mobos and LIKE to have support and upgrade options (thankyaverymuch)
 
[citation][nom]caamsa[/nom]Now here is a nice AMD budget machine and a good review. Enjoy!http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=835&p=7[/citation]
Not easy finding an HD 4770 for $90. Newegg that $200 CPU/GPU combo would be at $220+ if an HD 4770 even stays in stock.

Stock clocked it would be very nice for sure. If they actually managed 3.8GHz on the retail cooler, that's pretty amazing too! (cooler isn't specified from what I can see)

I'd love to pit this CPU up against the E5200 that is $40 cheaper, and the Phenom II X3 710 for $10 more. Stock speeds, clock for clock OC, and max OC would be a nice test of what is really the ultimate budget gaming processor.

I would say the conclusion is poured on thick though. "Ultimate budget processor for gamers", "Award winning combo". "unbeatable $200 ($220) combo", etc. As just one example, an E5200 + HD 4870 is actually slightly cheaper on Newegg and would likely be the better OC'ed gaming combo in almost all games. Still it's a very nice combo for non-overclockers. For the OC'er I'd wager saving $40 on an E5200 would net about the same performance.
 
im going with amd on my next build.the value for some one like me is undeniable.sure i would love a bad ass i7 rig but i dont have that kind of money.
 
What this article failed to explain (at least I didn't get it) is the difference between Athlon and Athlon II. Is Athlon II a brand new architecture or is it just an Athlon with DDR3 support?
 
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