Phenom II, i7, and You
by Chris Willhite on January 9th, 2009 at 9:59 am EDT - 460 views
Well AMD’s Deneb processor now known as Phenom II has been released yesterday and I have taken the liberty of reading almost every review on Earth…At least the ones in English. So here is a basic overview of all of the reviews I have read and my thoughts on the new chip.
The new chips come in 2.8 and 3.0Ghz flavors with a 45nm manufacturing process and larger L3 cache, among other improvements. At prices ranging from $235 to $275 which, if cut even a bit, will likely put the pressure on Intel to lower their prices for the new i7.
Overview of the Reviews
There are tons of reviews on the web for the new chip (too many to list here) and all of them have been fairly consistent in their findings…
The new Phenom II’s seem to compete best against the Core 2 Quad series of processors best while the i7 takes the lead in most benchmarks. This, I believe, is due mainly to the triple channel memory controller that the i7 sports, and DDR3 doesn’t hurt either. The phenom does come close in some tests, however, the i7 still remains to be one monster of an opponent.
For gamers the new chips don’t offer much improvement over previous quad cores. The gaming world hasn’t been fully optimized for quad cores and even then most of the stress is on the videocard. The i7 again beats the Phenom II in most game benchmarks at the lowest settings but since gamers don’t like low settings it’s almost irrelevant. At high resolutions there is virtually no performance difference with the chips which might make the Phenom II an attractive choice for a cheaper quad core solution, especially those looking to build a “Dragon” platform.
In overclocking the new Phenom II does offer much improvement over the previous phenoms with 3.6 GHz often being easilly acheivable by almost all of the reviewers. Even at 3.8Ghz on air cooling the Phenom II manages to stay under a load temp of 40*c.
My Thoughts…
Right now unless you wanna be top-of-the-line Mr. Fancy-pants and buy an i7 go ahead, it’s the best out there right now. However, for the budget conscious, it doesn’t really matter now whether you get an AMD or Intel quad core. Both have good priced mid-range processors that get the job done and get it done well. The only factor for the average builder/gamer is weather you prefer certain chipsets or videocards. This is where there is a great range of prices for components and will be more crucial for deciding what CPU to go with.
A list of Phenom II reviews can be found on Bjorn3D.
Image courtesy of hardwarezone
