Overclocking: Core i7 Vs. Phenom II

[deanjo]

Why not see what overclocks are able to be had with a Nvidia 780a chipset for the Phenom II. We see all kinds of reviews being done with the AMD chipsets but none the Nvidia's. From personal experience I'm able to squeak out 100-200 mhz better clocks on the nvidia boards despite them not having ACC.

 

[leo2kp]

I assume you have v-sync turned off. I use an NVidia card and updated drivers and you cannot turn off v-sync in Vista 64. How were you able to? Is this an NVidia driver issue since you were able to with an ATI card, or is there another way to shut it off?

 

[zenmaster]

I'm not quite sure how you came to the conclusion that the Phenom II came "close" to the i7 on most of the benchmarks. And the differences are not small ones only noticable in Benchmarks.

The AMD is nice for power consumption and if you needed to have a lab full of Quads, it would make a nice selection.

However, it still has a price issue. A Q6600 system will run noticably less than the PII but in this case the results will likely be close with the Q6600 still possibly winning the day based on your previous tets which shows the Q6600 only trailing PII by 1% with a large Mhz gap that would be close to almost NIL when both are OC'd.

While the 775 is End of Line, the Phenom may be close to the same boat actually. It will be a great upgrade for older AM2+ owners, but while there may be some process improvements over the next couple years there will likely not be massive gains beyond where they are now until their next gen chip is released in 2011. At this point a new socket is expected.

So, PII is a great upgrade for older owners but when looking at systems for new Builds I really don't see 775 being less viable than the AMD solution in terms of future upgradability. The new Intel socket is the one with that advantage since when the 32nm chips come out, they will use the same socket and those chips should work in existing boards.

 

[Tjik]

I pretty fair review and best of all it did take into account different perspectives. I've read some other tests already and they didn't even bother to compare the price difference between the systems.

I'm not sure a I follow your argument about performance. I'm not a gamer, but most here look for a decent gaming rig. More use bigger screens and as already stated in some comment here the refresh rate of the screen is a hardware limit by itself that no GPU or CPU can undo. In that perspective I would say it's a equal gaming performance score between the two.

Off-topic: I was amused to the comment by apache_lives saying that P4 made the system more alive and responsive. That would be the last thing I thought of when remembering the awkward days of the P4.

 

[PrangeWay]

hmm. you must have a really bad chip or something quirky.
My 940 is at 3.6ghz, 18x200 with 1.4 volts.
Not 1.6. That's heavy. Really heavy...

 

[jcknouse]

I will be eager to see a comparison once the AM3 PhenomII's come out, if they have a new chipset design as well.

This is definitely a step in the right direction for AMD though. Good for them.

Very nice article.

 

[zodiacfml]

still core2duo performance and overclock for me. no surprises.
yet, still good job by amd for matching c2d in all aspects, better late than never.
box builders now won't go wrong with either system.
i guess, we won't see a price war, only subtle drops.

 

[Guest]

Was it really that hard to get another TRUE? Comparing OC results with a TRUE vs a dinky cooler with a 70x70x15 fan is a joke. Considering the fact that people hit 3.5GHz on stock cooling, these oc results are worthless.

 

[Pei-chen]

[citation][nom]johnbilicki[/nom]It's simple: AMD wins here.1.) Price: We don't NEED DDR3, read my performance comments. You can get 4GB of DDR2-1066 for $55 on Newegg. I can spare 50FPS when I'm already getting more FPS then my LCD can handle.2.) Power: I live in Florida and the last thing I want is excessive heat. I can drop my Opteron 185 down to 1.8 from 2.6 so I look forward to buying the X4 940.3.) Unless you're dead set on playing Crysis at 2560x1600 what's the point? LCD's run at 60Hz and you'll have a hard time convincing most people the difference between 130 FPS and 185FPS. I'd much rather impress my girlfriend with a nice dinner then spend an extra $300-$400 on more performance that doesn't make a difference now in the vast majority of games (and doesn't make a difference in any of the games I play).Intel wins if you're loaded enough to care about Crysis at 2560x1600. Besides AMD has made our lives insanely easier by creating numerous possible upgrade paths….[/citation]
Or just get a $100 LGA775 board + $180 Q6600 or $320 Q9550 + DDR2 RAM. It will either cost $100 less or perform 10~20% better at the same price. I think your girlfriend will be better impressed with your math skill than one fancy diner.

 

[squatchman]

You used a TRUE, but what kind of fan(s) did you put on it? Also, did you use the correct mounting clip to secure it to the board? You can fry an egg on the computer at 80c.

 

[spanner_razor]

Regarding cooling for the Phenom 940 would an existing AM2 be compatible. I currently use an arctic freezer 64 pro, will that work with a phenom II, it's effective on my 6000, could be another saving for upgraders. Currently though (at least in the UK) there are no oem phenom's being sold however.

 

[jrabbitb]

"That’s a system architecture detail, and both capacities are what we’d consider sweet spots for each respective platform." - How exactly do you figure this?

if memory serves toms has already shown that for windows vista 64bit, 8gb of ram is optimal, and that further performance can be gained by dropping the page file completely and letting ram handle everything. (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/vista-workshop,1775-12.html)

I'd be curious to see 6gb vs 6gb or 6gb vs 8gb (as i think the 8 would even out the prices between the setups a bit closer). It would also be nice to see the Core 2 Quad 6600 overclocked, and can we see all 3 compared to stock speeds? Can we see what happens when you shut off the page file for all 3?

Who remembers when toms was thorough about this kind of testing. this is the kind of quicky article I'd expect to show up 4 hours after the "phenom ii 940
AMD Phenom II X4: 45nm Benchmarked" article hits the main page. I mean, i know it takes time to run everything, but you could at least do what you have here, leave a partial conclusion and say that there will be a part 2 with some more variation and detail which is what we readers are looking for.

and as always, thanks for doing what is done here, i just want to see you take it up a notch.

 

[sparky2010]

Nice article! I'd really love to see just how the Phenom II scales compared to the 45 nm Core 2's.. since everybody says that AMD is a year behind Intel, then the Phenom II vs. latest Core 2 sounds good

reason is, just to see how much AMD had caught up assuming that this one year lag didn't exist.. so comparing the Phenom II 920 & 940 to the Q9650, QX9770 sounds pretty good from a tech point of view.. and you do still have the core 2's in the market.. also, this would do away with that crazy memory bandwidth advantage and multi threading capability of the i7's.. really hope toms tries this out!

 

[Guest]

Regarding idle power consumption in i7:

Did you turn on "C-state" in BIOS setup? I'm using Core i7 with ASUS P6T Deluxe in which the C-state feature is turned off by default. Enabling C-state would reduce dramatically idle power. While idle, the others cores will be in C7 state which virtually stop using power. Also, QPI clock speed is also critical for power consumption.

 

[bernardv]

cangelini:
- 790GX is newer, 790FX is still top end. Why did Asus put out 790FX/SB750 AFTER 790GX/SB750 if it isn't better?
- on AMD platform there is a thing called 'RAM divider'. With 19x muli, your divider was 10 and your RAM speed was just 380 x 2 = 760MHz! Check the web, do the math. You must raise FSB (core) freq. to get good performacne, not just multi.
- Regarding ACC - check xtremesystems forums etc.

 

[chaohsiangchen]

There's some comments about this article on overclock.net:

http://www.overclock.net/hardware-news/441431-toms-overclocking-i7-vs-phenom-ii-3.html

 

[megamanx00]

Looks like the Phenom II has decent value. It's too bad that the sample tested didn't hit a higher speed. Still, this does show that the CPUs have considerably more headroom than the old Phenoms and I hope AMD will capatilize on that by releasing higher clocked models to outpace the quads before the i5 arrives. I doubt Intel will increase Core 2 duo or quad speeds since they will not want it to cut into their planed i5 market.

 

[seboj]

Will we be seeing an i7 v. AM3 DDR3 comparison?

 

[spearhead]

[citation][nom]PrangeWay[/nom]hmm. you must have a really bad chip or something quirky. My 940 is at 3.6ghz, 18x200 with 1.4 volts. Not 1.6. That's heavy. Really heavy...[/citation] i agree since i have seen more reviews around and many claim you could easily reduce the voltage by a decent margin to save power while being on stock speeds to quite some power under load. and a friend who already own a phenom II 940 and they can run it quite easily at 1.4v @ 3500 ghz with quite some head room available, 4GHZ isn't that much of a problem with a decent motherboard and cooler. both asus and gigabyte offer great GX boards. And i might add that we will soon see the ultra durable class from gigabyte for phenom II. they claim to get less hot because they have bigger copper lanes and also fit a 8 pin power connector and a more advanced heat-pipe solution. yet asus offers great bios features. I hope to find some compresion soon between ASUS and Gigabyte offerings. Asus M3A78-T is quite good but i read the voltage regulators and the mosfeds can get quite hot due to the lack of a heat-pipe system which the delux version has. gigabyte might not have this problem but they lack some features such as express gate AI overclock and AI nap.I hope the price will soon drop under 200 euro then i might go for it But if intel would slash its prices of core I7 or core2quad (the 12mb versions) then i might go for them.
within another 2 months we will already see the newer gen of graphics and the AM3 version of phenom showing up its face on cebit so it is worth to wait a little.

 

[konjiki7]

Why can everyone else push the Phenom II to 3.7-3.9ghz @ 1.50+ V and not tom's?

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]eodeo[/nom]Could you please disclose what are you testing in Max 9, maybe even share the scene so we could also test it? By your own scoring, i920 @ 3.8ghz in this test is slower than c2q 6600 @ 2.4ghz. I know something whent wrong, but I dont know what.[/citation]

eodeo,

Just an FYI, those 3ds Max numbers were really bothering me this morning, so I tore down the system and built it back up again. Sure enough, the scores changed, despite the fact that these were run multiple times before, with and without the CPU TM function enabled. The graph and analysis section are both updated to reflect this.

Thanks,
Chris

 

[tamalero]

cangelini: I think they mean the 790FX with the new 700's chips, not the old SB600's

 

[billiardicus]

Nice write up. A few comments:
1. I don't care about unstable OC results. It sounds like you guys pushed the AMD chip as hard as possible, and it was just stable enough to finish the benchmark, IE it's not really stable.
2. How about matching it up against a Q6600, both overclocked on air to a STABLE speed.

It seems to me the only one who could be interested in this new AMD chip is users who already have an AMD mobo, and don't want to build an entire new system around the i7.

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]seboj[/nom]Will we be seeing an i7 v. AM3 DDR3 comparison?[/citation]

Absolutely.

As for the overclocking, I agree, it would have been great to see the chip hit higher frequencies. As new models cycle into the lab, we'll be testing them. However, one question that pops up over and over when a new chip is unveiled is: why don't you guys ever overclock BOTH competing architectures and see how they stack up--so that's what we did here.

 

[the_timonator]

other things you could by with that price savings over the i7 are: another 4870 (for crossfirex) another ssd for raid, more ram, a g25 (or some other cool controller) water cooling, and my favorite a better monitor to handle all the performance. other than that you could pretty much get anything you wanted with it.