turboflame :
gee, this seems like unbiased and credible evidence to support the conclusion that AMD is beating Intel and Intel is paying people to go on random online stores to criticize AMD's processors.
That's ridiculous. What he seems to be trying to say is that, even though Intel is "beating" AMD at the high end, Phenom's are not the disasters that Intel fan boy's claim. They're a budget quad core, not the enthusiast's quad core. We might have to wait for a few years before AMD competes at that price segment again.
As for Intel paying people, I never heard that they did. I did hear that Nvidia employees did that in a past generation GPU war.
Most people who fell for "Intel inside" marketing during the Netburst days were happy with their CPU's. So, I'm sure there were plenty of good reviews then. People usually compare their new PC to their old PC. Since most buyers of Dell's, HP's etc. only upgrade every 4 years or so, they're bound to be happy even if it's a new Celeron or Sempron.
I can't wait to upgrade to Phenom, I'm just waiting till late February to see if B3 stepping is around the corner. I'd rather have 45nm and 65 watts over 65nm and 95 watts.
TSIMonster :
Well, for a budget quad-core system they are working well. I just built a Phenom system last week for some video work and testing. It is running very well.
Specs:
ASUS 690G Motherboard
Phenom 9500
XFX 8800GST 320
2GB of A-DATA DDR2 800
Antec earthwatts 430
At all stock settings with anti-virus going it scored 10k in 3DMark06. I thought that was great for stock settings. The CPU Marks were right near 4000.
I saw the bundle at Fry's last weekend but didn't have the spare cash yet to get it. Besides, I already have a couple of ASUS 690G motherboards, but the bundled boards should have the latest bios. Otherwise, I'll just have to flash the bios on each board.
Still, I"m tempted to give hybrid Crossfire a try. Would a Phenom on an upcoming 780G board with the IGP and a 3470 come close enough to a 3850 to make it worthwhile? The first incarnation of hybrid Crossfire won't have the energy saving features, nor will it support a card above the 3470. Too bad about that.
Phenom performance at that price doesn't disappoint me, but an incomplete hybrid Crossfire at launch does.