3Ball :
I full well understand where you are coming from with the increase from netburst to C2D, but there are posts on this very thread showing the 6000+ beating the fastest phenom so...please show me this 17% increase you speed of. If you are going to say that the clock speed is the issue then I just wont respond back, because in that respect the P4 should have ripped apart the C2D. If it is going to take a quad threaded app for phenom to beat its predecessor then I am not impressed. If they get the speed up to 3ghz and I see this 17% increase on average across many apps then I will be impressed, but until then...I will not be. Sorry, if this hurts anyones feelings, but I am not going to be hard on one company (Intel with P4) and then not on the other (AMD with Phenom) when in fact neither impress me.
Best,
3Ball
I don't expect you to be hard on one company and not the other. I have issues with Phenom too. Part of me wants to get one that's B3, but the sensible side says just get a Phenom dual core (or triple core) and wait for 45nm and more apps for quad core. My whole point is that many of the Intel fanboys who ignored Netburst issues and preferred their company's failure of design vision back then are now eager to attack AMD for theirs.
I guess you won't respond to my answer re: the 6000 and Phenom. It's the clock speed within the same architecture. It's not rational to compare the P4 situation vis a vis X2 with the Phenom situation vis a vis X2. Netburst was so inefficient, at least by Prescott days, that clock speed meant bupkis overall. People crowed that they got their Smithfield 805 stable to 4 gigahertz on expensive water cooling and yet it barely equaled or beat a much lower clocked Athlon X2.
Phenom beats the X2 6000 in some apps, but the X2 6000 beats Phenom in games. Not all that much, mind you, but it still wins out. The efficiency of the Phenom cores, as documented by Tom's Hardware test results is real, it does not mean that a 2.3 gigahertz always beats an X2 6000:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/01/14/phenom_vs_athlon_core_scaling_compared/
Phenom beats X2 6000 in 3DS Max:
In Mainconcept:
Athlon X2 6000+ beats Phenom in AVG antivirus:
In Prey, the Athlon X2 6000+ wins again:
Yet, in Supreme Commander, which benefits from more cores, the Phenom beats the X2 6000+
I want a Phenom over an Athlon X2 6000+ because I don't play barely multithreaded FPS. The older CRPGs I play won't be hindered by a Phenom but the newer CRPGs and RTS titles I want to play will benefit. A lower clocked Phenom will beat out an Athlon X2 at any clock speed if the game or application that the Phenom runs supports more than 2 cores.
Supreme Commander, World in Conflict, Age of Conan, LOTR Online, The Witcher, Hellgate London and other games will do well enough on a Phenom. Games like Spore, Alan Wake and probably even Fallout 3 and the as yet unannounced TES V: Fargoth Dines on the Dunmer (nonworking title
) will do even better.
When AMD goes 45nm and gets a Phenom up to X2 6000+ clock speeds, then it will shine in even single or dual threaded games like the slightly outdated Prey, Half Life 2 and Serious Sam titles. As for Crysis, I'm sure a Phenom does quite well today. Sure, Intel does better, but Phenom beating an X2 core for core is not all that bad. Keep in mind that 25% of 2200 megahertz added to the Phenom's rating vis a vis X2 is somewhere around 2.75 gigahertz, which is enough under the X2 6000+ 3 gigahertz to be hampered in single threaded, or dual threaded games.
3Ball :
Considering the difference between 45fps and 60fps smoothness wise...I would say that is a pretty big difference. Maybe not % wise, but as far as gameplay it is much better. After all most of us consider 60fps a target area to get to in most of our games. Atleast I do.
I consider 30 fps to be the sweet spot, but then again, I don't play Crysis. The last FPS I tried was Far Cry, and I liked it but didn't love going around shooting people, not even bad guys. I enjoyed Oblivion much more, it's more fun tossing fireballs at daedra, hacking goblins to pieces with silver axes and sneaking around stealing an Elder Scroll from blind moth priests. The only quest arc that didn't work for me in Oblivion is the Dark Brotherhood, because I think that murder is bad for business (yay Thieves Guild!).
In CRPG's, 30 fps is quite playable. All the Fraps junkies need to realize that there are more genres than FPS where 10 fps makes or breaks it for the enthusiast gamer.
Yes, Wolfdale beats C2D beats Phenom, which sometimes beats X2 6000+ and sometimes not. Wolfdale is the one ring for Sauron to rule them all. Phenom at 45nm won't beat the 45nm Intel quad cores. AMD is back to the K62 days, that's my budget and it's fine by me. They will eventually get a new architecture out, after Swift fuses CPU and IGP into a quad core. Then we'll be back to seeing some real competition.
Until then, I'll still buy AMD because they can play Oblivion and other CRPG's, past, present and future. The only Intel I've recently considered is a Pentium dual core with a bundled ECS mobo at Fry's for $88 to replace the aging P4 630 that I cobbled together out of old parts when a friend gave me the CPU on an ASUS P5RD1 X200 mobo.
I considered it, but I decided not to go that way. The worm tongue lies of "Dude you got a Dell" and "Intel inside" during the Netburst days helped Intel survive what would have been a disaster for AMD. Restrictive agreements questioned on three continents in courts of law kept AMD out of the OEM marketplace when they had the best product for three years.
So, dude, I'm not buying Intel. Not until AMD catches up fully and has a much bigger market share. Sometimes, it's about fairness in economic choices and not just 20 fps.