Phenom II 955 Versus Core i7 920: Gaming Value Compared

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i thought i was alone :)
I will tell you a fact.
high-end sector exist just to determine in your mind what you will buy.
Mainstream sector is what you will buy (and is the most stable sector in price/performance) and in this sector are the money because is affordable for billions off people .

the best super-computers are with AMD cpus ...why? is simple ..the cheapest Giga Flops/second is from AMD and because their platform is the most versatile (you can buy new stuff to put in old stuff and vice-versa and here i am not referring just for cpus and ram all other components became compatible in this way )
i hope you guys know that: the human eyes are the limiting factor in games not the gpu or cpu ...why ? because in average 25frames/s is enough to create a fluent movement, only the games that lacks in optimization need more than 25 frames/s and this is the reality, that's why people are satisfied with mainstream product.

the mainstream sector brings you 40 FPS in average for at least full year


The point is: every time intel prepare to lunch something big they made an article who guide you towards INTEL.... the secret here is the mainstream platform I5 .
Let's recapitulate

In this article they say Intel is the alpha dog (true by the way)
Amd is good in what it does in their sector true again

but but but "if somebody gives me money i will buy intel" this are the editor words..... of course nobody will give you any money but the message is in your brain.

The article is a masterpiece but not in benchmark or media is masterpiece in mass control

The people want to be controlled. good luck!




 
[citation][nom]chaohsiangchen[/nom]That doesn't matter. Tom's staff chose 790X so that the two systems are at the same budget bin. Once you take AM3 790FX, the price difference is about $50 closer. Besides, you lose at most 5% to 10% performance with 790X. The problem with Phenom II is that, in addition to branch prediction and deficiency on SSE3, the L3 cache latency is really bad. L3 cache latency on Core i7 is almost half of Phenom II. Higher core speed probably won't make much difference, unless you start to jack up base clock. Most AMD boards out there can take up to 260MHz without mobo modification, and some can go as much as 280MHz. Then you probably need water cooling, Peltier or something better to advance into that range.The best way for AMD to increase performance on Deneb is to increase NB frequency. That will reduce L3 latency and probably overall memory through put. If they can achieve 2400MHz or even 2600MHz (4800GT/s to 5200GT/s), then the future deneb CPUs might be within 400MHz of IPC efficiency of higher-end Lynnfield. Lower clocked Phenoms will perform equivalent or probably better than Nehalem CPU running at 1.8-2.2GHz range. The new Opteron 138x and 24xx have 2200MHz NB frequency instead of 2000MHz. However, they need to concentrate their design team on Bulldozer and make Orochi into the market faster. We won't be able to see AMD challenging Intel again until late 2010.[/citation]
HELLO :)
Note the mysterious lack of idiot votes on this post = LMAO.
Thank you for this - it is like a breath of fresh air in this spintel dominated conspiracy. :)

AND DID YOU NOTICE 0 haha 0 in the overclocking details - or LACK thereof - that the precise NORTH BRIDGE adjustment you mention is somehow completely OMITTED - not to mention - NO DETAILS - are provided in the text for an explanation of HOW the prejudged winner i7 was overclocked. And nobody said a thing about it either - sham.

And yet - the Phenom II 955BE is described as being seriously overclocked and it is said that it (wording) starts to deteriorate above the mentioned clock - read it again for the first time. Obviously, as in previous tests, there is no real interest in killing i7, or blemishing it's benchmarketed reputation.
I believe with that NORTH BRIDGE clox, and a more serious test setup involving only single 4800's, that we would be able to actually see the cpu's at work. Rather, we are subjected to a smokescreen where the dual cards hide what the cpu's are able to do on their own.

And this under a guise of such passionate sincerity.

Thank you so much for your post - your knowledge of these cpu's is very visible. Well said. For a moment I thought I was in a real K10 forum. miss that. sounds like ab=zg :)
 
[citation][nom]playerone[/nom]THG - RIP!Nice one Don... [/citation]

Hmmm... let me see...

Yep. Still getting readers.

I'll take your opinion with a grain of salt, thanks. 😀


 
Yeah Don, if you want to become a noob site like MAXPC or someother you may indeed attract a few more readers. kind of like Detroit Iron, sitting on laurels while the world passsed them by. You have no real content that can be trusted so your readership will last how long? IS that what you want? It will follow you Don...like the toilet paper stuck on your shoes.
 
[citation][nom]utnorris[/nom]Ok, so I read all the comments and the article, what was the reason the I7 was not overclocked more? If we are talking about getting the most bang for our buck shouldn't that include the highest stable overclock we can achieve? I know I run mine at 4.2Ghz daily with just 1.27v vcore, so I know that THD didn't hit a wall due to voltage. I am just curious at why the low overclock, especially when 3.6Ghz seems to be the point where the cpu is no longer the bottleneck for gaming.There is no doubt you can save some money by going AMD, but you could also save some money going with the C2D which is really what the AM3 should be compared too, not the I7, that is unless you want to throw the budget out the window. As far as the RAM goes, didn't Anandtech do a nice little article talking about how lower latencies trumped speed 90% of the time? So why not go with some 1333Mhz ram, downclock it to 1080Mhz with some nice low latencies and save about $40 on both systems.Anyway, more interested in the reason behind the I7 overclock.[/citation]

Most any 940 will do much better as well, I am pushing 4Ghz on air but I am sure you leave me well behind. The problem with this review is that it seems the reviewer has the skills of a good BestBuy Geek squad tech and thats not saying much. You are right about the memory. PHX4 perform much better on lower latency and this was not set up that way. Someone here does not know how to AMD systems work as well as you comments concerning the Intel system. I love good hardware, The I7 is the best CPU period no doubt, but Money being what it is, reviews like this just dont help folks get the facts as they should be. I'll bet this gets redone at some point to correct the errors.
 
[citation][nom]computabug[/nom]Once again, Tom has taken Intel's bribe to make Intel appear much more superior...First of all, the AMD still costs much less than the Intel. Second of all, you don't need such expensive components for AMD. You just wasted all that extra money beefing it up with fancy parts to make Intel look like better value, and used the excuse that you couldn't afford 2x4850x2's with the savings. What, so does that mean that if I go under-budget in my build, I have to throw the remaining money in the trash? Just divide the performance by the cost, Don![/citation]
Agree. They could have run these tests on Ph II dually 550BE. Oh, I doubt anybody knows about that one. Imagine a hundred dollar dually runnning dual 4890's - I really think this is a vidcard demo for AMD. Funny also, they ran the tests in only Dx 10, I suppose to placate the nvidia fans. Maybe they will do that when ATI pops out the Dx 11 soon also.

"You just wasted all that extra money beefing it up with fancy parts to make Intel look like better value".
Careful, you might wake people up with that talk.
 
[citation][nom]playerone[/nom]IS that what you want? [/citation]

No, I'm happy to upset the occasional self-righteous shmuck into making baseless, sweeping claims that assume a level of importance several tiers above their reality.

Hey! Look at that. 😉
 
[citation][nom]lowguppy[/nom]For value though the Phenoms go head to head with Intel's Core 2 duos. the e5200 clocks up very nicely and is a $70 part that you can stick in a $100-$135 p45 Mobo, which is pretty hard to beat for your dollars.[/citation]

That's a BAD IDEA when you can get a real mobo and a Ph II 550 or a 720, for about same money and run circles around your end-of-life spintel junk that has zero for an upgrade path.
 
[citation][nom]Cleeve[/nom]No, I'm happy to upset the occasional self-righteous shmuck into making baseless, sweeping claims that assume a level of importance several tiers above their reality.Hey! Look at that.[/citation]

Wow! Did you actually read this review? Some of these comments offer some pretty relavant facts that should have been corrected before the test were ever performed and though he tried the author doesn't seem to have a clue.
 
[citation][nom]ravaneli[/nom]Sorry, the i7 platform would cost $480+ vs $169$ for the 5550BE. I ain't no matematician, but off the top of my head that looks awfully close to three times as much. TH, I CHALLENGE YOU TO MAKE A TEST OF THAT $169$ platform I mentioned and compare it vs the i7 platform. Do a test with ONE 4870, and then a separate test with TWO, so we can see the shift of bottlenecking.Thanks. Sorry for my frequent caps.[/citation]

Right On!!!!

Think they will undress the spintel idol? They won't do it - they lose all the ads money. didn't you read the EU report? that's the essence of the antitrust tactics, well actually there were tons of other rebate schemes. People need to read that, it's shocking.

Anyway, I would like to see the lil dually beat up the big expensive beeaatchh. can you heat the fanboys squirming?

btw - I think you would get run out of the spintel fan club :)
 
[citation][nom]Cleeve[/nom]No, I'm happy to upset the occasional self-righteous shmuck into making baseless, sweeping claims that assume a level of importance several tiers above their reality.Hey! Look at that.[/citation]

You can't even address the facts or the questions that have been raised concerning latency, NB settings and the so called overclock. Here many of us are trying to talk hardware, real world what is already well found knowledge concerning these parts and you behave like a little Kid? I hope you don't get paid for what you do and I would think in todays market your attitude wont help keep you in a job. Latter Ass.
 


Oh, I can. I simply choose to prod uppity folk like yourself instead of engaging them. You see, you lost the right for a meaningful response the moment you posted rudely.

As for you and your ilk, I simply do whatever i can to annoy you. And you know what? it always works! :sol:

 
[citation][nom]sighQ2[/nom]Thank you so much for your post - your knowledge of these cpu's is very visible. Well said. For a moment I thought I was in a real K10 forum. miss that. sounds like ab=zg[/citation]

I'm glad you like it. As a owner of Phenom 9850, which I bought in support of AMD when they need cash most, I would say that Phenom II isn't a bad buy. However, don't expect it'll do better in pure number crunching, benchmarking or frame rate testing then Core i7. Not even raising uncore clock can help that. Pipeline design, cache fetch algorithm, branch prediction and instruction handling are crucial in IPC efficiency as well, and none can be done without redesign or overhaul the architecture. Nevertheless, it is still a good buy for a gaming rig, considering that Phenom II seems to have better interruption handling:

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3506&p=9

Now that we have discussed the numbers, what about the game play experience? As we alluded to earlier, the Intel platforms had problems with minimum frame rates throughout testing - not just in the benchmarks, but also during game play in various levels and online. We have not nailed it down yet, but we have noticed this problem consistently. In contrast, the Phenom II X4 940 had rock solid frame rates and offered the smoothest game play experience. The problem is very likely driver related in some manner (as the man who helped to start DirectX once put it, "the drivers are always broken"), but nevertheless this is an issue on the two Intel platforms.
Click to expand...

No doubt. AMD/ATI also wrote the driver. That's why I asked a rematch with NVIDIA cards and mobo just out of curiosity.
 
[citation][nom]playerone[/nom]Oops, here is the link for "Here is my 8 gigs runing at 1120 - 5-5-5 at 3.93 on air, 800rpm fans. 24/7 on my cripple "980" M4N82 with one 285GTX and I have two SLI more slots to fill and a 965 on the way"http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=596569[/citation]
Holey S! Pretty good for 8 gis of ram!
 
[citation][nom]Cleeve[/nom]...for which you have no way to acquire without spending more compared to the i7, and losing the graphics card advantage - which has more of an impact.Sorry I didn't gain that half an FPS for the low latency RAM and lose 5 FPS by choosing lower-end graphics cards...Nice try #2![/citation]
Now I am convinced that you really are hiding the truth behind this idiot obsession with trying to match the gross overprice of spintel junk.
Yes. You can do it easily - use a triple core.

And I am not the only one yelling at you for not knowing - or ignoring - how to properly oclox a Phenom.

You are the tester - and you call the tune - and you deny the bribe - and you don't know how to pull it off; but your readers are way ahead of you.

and typos and petty insults reduce you to the level of the other idiot fanboys.

I was really impressed with how you began the article - but you sabotaged. OWN IT.

I challenge you to run the same test w a lil dually 550. That will give you all the money to equal the cost of the super jjunkkk.
Play your OWN GAME.
OWN IT - or find somebody else to insult.

Your placative conclusions - disgusting - but it's typical of most spintel paid sites. You mention in the midst of your conclusions, that you would get an i7 anyway because you run unknown "apps". At that point, you abandoned the testing, the results, the conclusions and revealed yourself as incompetent to people who really just keep on whining incessantly for fair and unbiased testing and reviewing.

Sorry to poo on your parade. Nice start. Bad ending.

As playerone and a few others have said, learn about Phenom and how to oclox it.

It can bust i7 - but you may not be allowed to report that.

It's not about nice - it's about antitrust. what's nice about that? you support it? read the EU results. shocking stuff.

I appreciate what you claim to be doing here; and I am serious about that. I just wish I could believe it. You have the potential to pull of some clean tests; but there may be some dark forces misinforming you - perhaps by omission. This angle of matching price is a scam.
 
[citation][nom]Cleeve[/nom]With the caveat that you don't plan to do anything with it other than game, maybe. For other CPU intensive tasks, I wouldn't agree.[/citation]
Like what?
And how is this diversion, which you also mentioned in your conclusions, relevant to this discussion about GAMING performance - hello?

3d grafx FX rendering studio in new StarTrek maybe?
 
Don,

I work in the field of flight simulation environmental programming and design. Its a decent job that gets a bit more complex everyday. I work with all types of systems, displays, data collection etc. and read all types of guides and reviews as well perform the occasional system build around here myself. We have to test out our ware thoroughly on many setups and be prepared to offer suggestions to the end buyer as to hardware before it goes to package. The investment from Government, Civil as well as the occasional entertainment group has never been "small", but lately the last six months have really taken a toll. Things are different. Well written Fluff is not what anyone needs right now. Well thought out and tested articles help inform and THG has been regularly linked to many of my E-mails, Blogs and even the occasional install guide - because they actually fit real world, exposed and demystified all the hype. Thanks to you that direction has changed for apparently the need for "more readership" as you said. I think you just helped THG to earn the bottom drawer. Cheers! :)
 
"Cheaper motherboards with the 790FX chipset can be found for as low as $135, such as the DFI LANParty DK 790FX-M2RS, which is about $45 less expensive than our test setup. Since the cheapest X58 motherboards are about $30 less expensive than the one we selected, we're still in the same range here."

Yes, they're $30 less expensive...they're also MicroATX, God forbid you go logically for the cheapest ATX boards possible or cheapest MicroATX boards possible... Just pick an expensive ATX Phenom II one and a cheap Core i7 ATX one.
 
[citation][nom]chaohsiangchen[/nom]I'm glad you like it. As a owner of Phenom 9850, which I bought in support of AMD when they need cash most, I would say that Phenom II isn't a bad buy. However, don't expect it'll do better in pure number crunching, benchmarking or frame rate testing then Core i7. Not even raising uncore clock can help that. Pipeline design, cache fetch algorithm, branch prediction and instruction handling are crucial in IPC efficiency as well, and none can be done without redesign or overhaul the architecture. Nevertheless, it is still a good buy for a gaming rig, considering that Phenom II seems to have better interruption handling:http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3506&p=9No doubt. AMD/ATI also wrote the driver. That's why I asked a rematch with NVIDIA cards and mobo just out of curiosity.[/citation]
Thx for reply. I hear the comment about who wrote the driver; but I am used to such comments going the other way; esp. regarding benchmarks and instruction sets and compilers.
I also know that spintel does not really have grafx - they do have cpu, obviously, and that's what they do, and will do with wannabee, if it ever happens. Beyond that I am not qualified to speak accurately; but do expect AMD, esp. with it's proposed Fusion is strongly approaching integration already, and that, perhaps more than we yet know.
I do not usually attend (nanandotek) site; since I have experienced great frustration with their blatant bias anti-amd.
I also plan on supporting AMD through the purchase of a new sys fairly soon. I will have a Phenom II either 550 or 720 cpu, probable MA790XT-UD4P, OCZram, maybe a 4850, etc.
Thx for sharing your expertise once again. :) I thought you were someone else from the zone; I was mistaken. But the comment re fresh air was sincere.
 


If you people look at the new builds on this site, well over half of them are i7 builds. It's been like this since the i7 came out. For the most part, gamers will spend an extra $150 USD to have an i7. It's the way it is. No matter how much money you can save on an AMD buld, the majority of gamers out there want an i7 build. It's like owning a car that does 200mph even though your only allowed by law to go 75mph. Whether it's a status thing or not, i7 is the big seller atm. 6 gigs of triple channel RAM, the ability to switch from Crossfire to SLI and back... the i7 builds can be beat for price, but not performance. And as I will state again, performance is what a lot of these people want nowadays. It's like owning a $200 mobile phone when a $50 phone will suffice for most needs. Again people will buy the more expensive phone. It's just life in this day and age.

http://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?name=MB-EX58U3R $178.99 | $163.99 after rebate
GIGABYTE GA-EX58-UD3R Core i7/ Intel X58/ DDR3/ CrossFireX/ A&GbE/ ATX Motherboard

http://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?name=I7-920 $271.88 Free Ground Shipping
Intel Core i7 Processor i7-920 2.66GHz 8MB LGA1366 CPU, OEM

Totol: $450
 
I can't believe i read nine pages of comments.

I am disappointed in another frustrating review from this site. I have come to expect it. I thought this would be different. nahhh.

more pro spintel propaganda - more bait for the fangirls - more unresolve. more misrepresentation of amd. and now an illusion that things have to cost the same. duhuhhh.

I remember the original tom's hardware guide featuring tom teaching everybody how to oclock using bus speed rather than multi.

I also remember things changed and I complained it was no longer what it used to be.

and now - I wonder why I'm here - or why I have returned, or how much of this playground I can take.

I suppose this is what - off topic?

sigh
.
 
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