High Treason, on 22 November 2014 - 05:27 PM, said:
it was produced long after I stopped following the industry entirely. Phenom is a CPU with an AMD logo ob it. Appears to be a 2.8GHz Quad Core from around 2008/2009. Presumably the competitor to the Core 2 Quad Q8400 as on paper it seems it yielded similar performance in desktop applications.
I'm weighing up whether to try it in place of the Core 2 Duo E8200 I have. The E82 machine is slow and has locked down PCI-E slots that don't allow video cards for some reason so it's stuck with a very poor Intel GMA. The Asus board appears to have an AMD chipset and has onboard video, presumably a low-end Radeon equivalent which would most likely outrun the Intel GMA and despite the fact I don't doubt the CPU is severely flawed it would probably give a slight boost. Just not sure I can overcome the level of distrust for anything with their logo on it; historically I do not get on well with post-K6 AMD stuff.
I've been switching between the two companies since I started building systems 12 years ago and I've never had a problem with either. Some of the older Via chipsets on Socket A and earlier suck, but that's about the only caveat with AMD. I started with the Athlon XP and went to the C2D when Intel finally stopped producing crap. Then went back to AMD, then Intel again. Worked on countless systems and owned shitloads of laptops.
The only company who has a habit of producing bunk silicon is Nvidia, IMO.
The original Agena core Phenom 1's with the TLB bug are flawed, but that flaw is totally blown out of proportion. I ran one for a while with the "fix" force disabled and never had an issue. Then my friend did the same for a year. Unless you're using VT, you won't see it.
I've worked with
so many Phenom II's over the years, and I owned one myself, I'm not exaggerating when I say it's one of the
greatest processors ever. There's nothing it can't do, it's very cheap, it doesn't run super hot, it overclocks FANTASTIC (especially with a black edition chip!) and it's
so much more advanced than the C2Q, architecture wise.
The C2Q starts choking when you try to overclock it, and it's performance with DDR3 is T-E-R-R-I-B-L-E. The Phenoms are true quads, not just dual Conroes on a PCB, the memory controller is built onto the die and there's no FSB to worry about. (Bus speed in the BIOS is kind of a misnomer with these). The presence of an FSB on the C2Q ruins the DDR3 performance. It starts to level off above 1066. It also limits the OC potential, at high clocks getting them stable is literally trial and error as you encounter FSB holes. It may not post, but ratchet it up 10MHz, and it'll come back to life. Also, if you do manage sick OC's on a C2Q, the crappy memory bandwidth bites you in the ass.
On top of all that, Intel downclocked the C2Q like cray cray and charged out the ass for faster chips that weren't any faster than the equivalent Phenom II, which was half the price.
Only the very earliest Phenom II steppings can't do dual channel DDR3-1600. Those are obscenely rare.
Always disliked the Core 2 Quad. Lousy CPU by comparison.