Majority of real Phenom Users are Very Happy

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randomizer

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And then there are the people who cut their PCIe connectors so that the card fits in a PCI slot. When it doesn't work they say the card was faulty and newegg sucked becuase they didn't accept an RMA.
 

yay

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Why do all of you hate the phenom so much?
Its not a bad chip, especially for mainstream.
Thunderman took it a bit over the edge but thats no reason to take out your built up anger at a processor. It just sounds like jealousy.
 

randomizer

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Why not? The chip can't be offended. If you like we could divert our insults to Hector Ruiz again.
 

turpit

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People dont hate it, they just dont know what it is. Know one knows its not a bad chip, nor that its not a decent chip...we are only just finding out what it really is. The performance specs AMD touted were false. The testing was NDA'd, and controled to the point of being untrustable. Reports from tech sites vary. SPEC benchmarks were pulled for non compliance. Skus were pulled from release and the server varients stop shipped, with shipments only allowed on a case by case basis, and only after customer application assesment. Reports of a bug but without actual test data showing exactly where it occurs.

Only as people start to buy Phenoms and report/reveiw their experiances, will we really know what Phenom is, and even those reports/reviews must be taken with a grain of salt as there is no garuntee the individual creating the review is not a blind fanboy, who's opinion was formed before he actually bought or used the product.

Read the threads. What people dont like is being lied to. AMD lied.
 

croc

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I'd not say 'lied' so much as stretched the truth all the way from Cal. to Aus...

Truth is kind of like a rubberband... Stretch it too far, it breaks. And the snap back is really going to hurt those that were stretching...

But then, I try (usually) to be polite.
 

yipsl

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There's something about competition between AMD and Intel, and between ATI and Nvidia, that get's people all out of whack. It's rather silly if you ask me. Intel fanboys loved Netburst and Nvidia fanboys loved the FX series, despite Netburst getting beat by Athlon X2 in benchmarks, and despite the FX 5200 being a lousy card.

Now, ATI and Nvidia are fairly close; both have good products. AMD and Intel are close, both have good products. Nvidia will get their 9xxx series out sooner than AMD's R700, so the gap will widen. Intel will get their next incarnation out sooner than Swift (which might not improve things for AMD, except in notebooks). So it goes.

AMD has always played second fiddle to Intel, but not because Intel's always had the best -- except in bribery, strong arm tactics and marketing; correct that, I mean OEM rebates, restrictive agreements and marketing; which is elegant lying no matter how it's phrased. AMD has always had an uphill battle.

I went Netburst in time for Morrowind only because of Tom's article regarding Athlon XP's frying when the heatsink was removed. I went Athlon X2 over Pentium D because Intel had the spaceheaters and poor performance. Now, I'm sticking with AMD because I just don't like Intel's tactics, though I do like their CPU's.

I don't see AMD's Phenom's being all that much behind a Q6600, and they're in my budget gamer price range. My only issue is how close 45nm is to market. If I owned AMD stock, I'd be upset at Hector Ruiz and AMD's complacency. They did decent native quad core at 65nm but they could have done better quad core at 65nm if they'd stuck two Brisbanes together, despite the fact that a single Phenom core is 17% to 25% better than the equivalent Brisbane.

AMD will probably get their act together by the time it's 45nm, definitely by Swift. Still, I expect Intel to be ahead and Intel fanboys to be bullies on this board. I've seen it before. Fanboys of AMD, Intel, ATI and Nvidia can be bullies and misrepresent the competing product. That's why fans are better than fanboys. It's okay to have brand loyalties and to buy from the underdog, but there's no reason for anyone to ever say that the other company's product is sheer dreck -- except for Pentium D Netburst, that is. That I will call dreck.

If anyone doubts that Phenom's a decent CPU at the price, just compare benchmarks to the Q6600. Close enough considering the price, and the upgrade path for those of us who have AM2 motherboards by companies that got a bios out in time.
 
I don't have one yet as I am waiting for a B3.

A couple of friends have B2's and they are happy with them for encoding / ripping etc but have noted there is no performance gain for gaming - both had higher end AMD rigs which were overclocked.

That's the limit of my local experience here ...

Phenom isn't an enthusiast part ... so I am not interested in it.

For me to upgrade I want the silicon to suffer - the Phenom is just not designed to be thrashed ... yet.

I think it would be a good upgrade for a family PC ... making it a bit more useful for intensive tasks ... but only if it is a simple chip swap.



 

meadowlands

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I think one of the major issues with Phenom is that if you search on Newegg, there are only a handful of AM2 boards which support it and they are all over $100.

There are tons of boards which support the Q6600 and some are <$100...
 

yomamafor1

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So in short, a brand new released, constantly hyped product is about 10% slower than an one year old product.
 

drysocks

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A 30% cheaper unit is 10% slower. :D
 

keithlm

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A newly released product that is still having a few loose ends taken care of and where people are still figuring out its tweaks and "intricacies" is slightly slower on a few benchmarks (and faster on some) than a product that has had all the window dressing done and all the tweaks/intricacies figured out.

Actually when you look at it that way it makes the Phenom look really good.

(Especially when you consider the motherboard chipset of "choice" is still immature. Wonder what will happen when the AM2+ chipsets mature.)
 

ImajorI

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Not to bash, but why can't a big company like AMD with rooms of engineers figure those out prior to release?
 

yomamafor1

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I guess time will tell. At the moment, Phenom is less attractive than the high end X2 it was supposed to replace.
 

keithlm

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Do you believe that when Intel releases a new chip that there are no issues to be cleaned up or tweaks to be figured out? That the motherboard chipset is always 100% mature on the date of the chips release?
 

ImajorI

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Your right but IMO since core 2 Intel seems to have done a better job than AMD of releasing products with fewer "loose ends" as you put it. And I have and will again own AMD stock, its just my opinion on their performance the last couple of years.
 

yomamafor1

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The problem is, we're about 10 days short of 2 months after Phenom's introduction, yet we're still seeing incompatibility between motherboards, that was promised by AMD. IMO, this is very poor communication between AMD and the motherboard manufacturers.
 


Yup, give them time to fix it. Oh wait, the fix causes it to be 10-20% slower! D'oh!
 

keithlm

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Just to add perspective:

You say 10 days short of 2 months.

So you mean about 6 weeks; with two of those being major holiday weeks. SO really... about 4 weeks or 1 month.

(Which is the 1 month + change where all of the AMD hardware developers went on vacation since they'd been working hard on getting the release done.)

So a rational person wouldn't have expected any kind of fixes or updates until... about NOW.

=======

Also in discussing that subject we have two issues: The chipset designed for the Phenom and the AM2 chipsets that are supposedly compatible.

One of these is very important. The other is only a minor concern; an added bonus.

I salute AMD for attempting to make their new chip backward compatible instead of just coming out with a new socket and saying "Sorry legacy folks". But most bios issues are motherboard hardware manufacturer issues.

(Just like Vista still has driver problems because device driver programmers didn't want to bother updating their drivers and actually following the rules of the operating system instead of bypassing it for their own personal optimizations.)
 


AMD promissed backward compatability, and seems to have only partially delivered.

The TLB bios fix has nothing to do with motherboard manufacturers, they did nothing wrong. It has to do with a design defect of K10.