The New AMD Building Thread

Shaff,
The 7750 and the 7850 are phenom x4s, with two deactivated cores. They call it an Athlon, but they have Barcelona cores. With the Kuma's it's about 50% whether they will unlock. With the Phenom II x3 it's about 90%!

Russ

 

got ya. how about the PII X2 550BE?

 

Shaff,
According to AMD, it's AM2+/AM3. They do not say it directly, but when you go to recommended motherboards for the 550BE, there's a flock of 780GX boards listed, and none of them are AM3!

Russ

 

I'll be honest, the new round of CPUs is fabulous. It's been a long time but I can genuinely now say AMD are back in the game. I still don't believe in unlocking cores, it's too board specific, but stock performance wise, to see AMD competing with the high-end Intels, very good news. Quads are still a little bit on the weak side as they use so much damn power and are reluctant to OC, but the Triple-cores are very good value, and I'm loving the 65W 'e' range for AM3.

 

Here something from Xbit Labs regarding the new Athlon x2 and Phenom II x2 Dual Cores and the Phenom II x3. Interesting reading!

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/phenom-athlon-ii-x2.html

Enjoy,
Russ

 

Haha I'm glad you think so

AMD made a mistake with Phenom. Rushed design led to bugs, low OC headroom, and mediocre performance. There were a few decent deals here and there but not much worth considering. Phenom II has seen major strides in performance, stability, efficiency, and OC headroom. They still match maybe the 1st gen Core 2 Duos/Quads(E6750/Q6600) but they also closely match the OC potential. I'm hopeful this can mean further refinements on the architecture.

 

Estuansis,
AMD did indeed make a mistake with the original Phenoms. Thankfully, the people responsible for that Fiasco are gone! In case you haven't noticed, the Phenom IIs are generally in the Q9550 and Q9650 range performance wise. Even their Phenom II x2 550BE Dual Core beats out the Dual Core E6750 and the Q6600 easily!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

First, let me apologize for asking a question I should probably know by now. I have a rather selective memory LOL! E.g. when I ask the questions, I have a much stronger chance of remembering them. Is this a good score here??? What's a good/recommended program for runnning SuperPI? Funny, I get the feeling i've asked this before LOL!

Oh, something interesting. It took 15 sec, on XP, though there are at least 4-5 more programs running in the background. This was ran via Windows 7

 

Oman7,
Nope! Ain't happening! Something is either wrong with the software, or the computer, because a Core i7 965 couldn't do that score if it was overclocked to the moon! Where's the rest of it? There should be 24 rows of calculations! I don't think it ran all the way through, as all that shows is the initial value finished.

Christ, I got to 24.319 seconds today with SuperPi 1M, and I was extremely happy! LOL!! Still can't validate the damn thing! I wish Xtreme systems would get their thumb out of there ass and fix the validation part! It was broken when they took control of SuperPi, and all these months later it still doesn't work. It returns an Invalid Checksum!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Sorry about that. Im new to this particular software
Hows this?

 

Oman7,
I can see that it never completed the 32M. It's the same as v1.50. Click Calculate, set what test you want to run, and hit the button that appears. Your pic is the summary of what the software has done at all the settings you've tried, the rest are zeros. Give it another shot and if it still messes up, I would download 1.50!

Russ

 

I didn't run the 32M test. It appeared that it was gonna take longer than I wanted to give it dedicated time LOL! When Im running bench marks, I dont like interfering with the results. I fear of tainting them. I'll run one in the morning, then post again. Although, something tells me its gonna be in the 22 minute range.

 

Oman7,
My 1M SuperPi with my E6750@3.55GHz was 13.859s. 32M was 14m 46.062s, yet I was proud to knock a half a second off of my best SuperPi. I increased the CPU north Bridge Frequency so it's a little over 2000. I don't know if you've played with it at all, but it's worth a look! I just raised the multiplier from 9x to 10x. I'm going to let it run this way for a day or two and see how it behaves. So far this is the best it's ever run! I'm liking it even more than before. Here's what it shows in AMD OD!


Note the NB Speed of 2009.25MHz (was 1800+). The next step up would be another 200MHz, so 11x would be 2200+! Maybe Sunday. I still have yet to learn anything meaningful about the HT yet, but I'm getting there! LOL!! It's just so different from the Intels! Stay Tuned and let me know about the CPU/Northbridge!

Oh! It increased my Memory Bandwidth over 400MBs!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Realistically, AMD are doing far better in the dual and triple core markets than quad cores still. Intel pricedropped the Q8 series significantly which renders the X4 940 and X4 920 a bit on the poor side, especially the 920 as it was never price-slashed. The 905e is an awesome CPU, a 65W fully fledged quad core, but is rather expensive. Still, arguably it can be, since its rival, the Q8200S, is more expensive still (Intel really ought to bring that down considering how good value the other S series Quads are)
The 955 is certainly a fast CPU rivalling the Q9550, but with the decrease in cost of the Q9550, performance/£ is about the same, and the 40% overclockable 90W CPU is more attractive than the 20% overclockable 125W CPU.
Because CPUs like the E6750 are old, the AMDs never had a particularly hard time beating them. What's different about this new architecture is that it can take the present Wolfdale CPUs. the 7750 and 7850 could match the E5200 and E5300 budget CPUs but little else and as such, were crazy cheap, but overclocking was pretty much a non-event due to the Phenom I architecture and the less said about power consumption the better.
The new 65W chips are still a lot less efficient than the Intels they rival but it's nowhere near as bad as it was and the performance they offer is comparatively remarkable. The £80 Phenom II 550 is taking on £100 giants like the E7500 and doing very well at it. Overclocking still leaves a bit to be desired, but keep things stock and an AMD system is every bit as worthwhile a purchase as an Intel. Or is it? The rather unfortunate revelation about new CPUs requiring AM3 is a little disappointing. Granted, it is nowhere near as much of a setback as i7 CPUs requiring LGA1366 but it's still a bit of a downer.
There's nothing to stop you putting any AM2+ chip in a £60 board, the MA770-UD3 is quite a nice option for that. AM3 though, it's about a £90 starting point in most places for the full fat 790GX chipset, not to mention the cost of DDR3. That's a shame because a high end architecture like that really has no business being mandatory for cheap £60,£75 dual core CPUs.

 

Sam,
The Phenom II 550 is AM2+/AM3! I posted some tests on it along with 2 C2Ds, a Phenom II x3 720 and the new Phenom II x2, from a major forum and they tested it with both AM2+ and AM3 motherboards. I don't know what happened to the post, but the link was there, because I always try every link after it's posted to see if it works! I'll have to track it down. History on firefox sucks!

Russ

 

I have to ask, why did it take testing to find this out, couldn't AMD have made it clear to start with? :S

 

I don't know the answer to that one but here is a Phenom II 550-BE running on an AM2+ motherboard at 3.8GHz!
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/phenom-athlon-ii-x2_13.html#sect0

There's also the new Athlon II x2 250, again on AM2+ @3.9GHz. I do know that finding anything on their site is a PITA! The Newegg link for the Manufacturer's Product Page takes you to the CPU Main page, and they go out of their way to make it hard to find out the facts! Nowhere do they mention compatibility, as that page isn't working. If I hadn't come across this article, I wouldn't have known for sure! They both perform quite well!

Russ

 

True, but remember that's 3.9 starting from 3.0, i.e. a 30% increase. Not bad, but the E5 series is famed for 50%+ overclocks... As ever, my liking of these CPUs is for their stock ability, they're relatively unremarkable in the hands of enthusiasts, especially the 550 with its 23% overclock.

 

seriously no one cares about % overclockes, only how much they clock to.

 

What? So if a 3Ghz and 2.5Ghz CPU are evenly matched, and they both overclock to 4Ghz, it doesn't matter that the percentage change is different? We're not comparing like CPUs here.