skierkid450 wrote:they have some efficiency problems to work out, but they still ARE putting out revolutionary technology, and you have to love the fact that you can get any AM2/AM2+/AM3 board and slip in a phenom
The platform is great... It is very flexible with upgrading as you noticed and pointed out. The Radeon 3800 series brings HD and great gaming graphics to mainstream users for under $180 and at low power consumption. The OverDrive utility is going to be awesome for overclocking, temperature checking and finding out what is going on with the system. Two thumbs up to that as it is a cheaper and easier route than NVIDIA's ESA that needs ESA power supplies, cases and cooling to work fully. The Phenom and 7-series motherboards are what need some work. The BIOS on these boards is rough... How many reviews out there used 64-bit Vista? All of the ones I have see used 32-bit. Editor's day all had 2GB of memory with 32-BIT Vista installed, so I wonder if there is something to that. I don't have a board, so I can't say. Many of the reviews like the one
Kyle did over at HardOCP used ES samples that came from others in the industry (not AMD). After looking at his page I can't tell if he used 32-bit or 64-bit though. Actually wasn't Forceware 163.99 Windows XP 32-bit?
The motherboard issues need to be worked out in the BIOS ASAP and I wouldn't really call them efficiency problems or maybe you are right. Here is something else I just noticed going over my notes...
Processor TDP
Phenom 9900 - 2.6GHz - 140W
Phenom 9700 - 2.4Ghz - 125W
Phenom 9600 - 2.3Ghz - 95W
Phenom 9500 - 2.2Ghz - 95W
Going up from 2.3Ghz to 2.6Ghz there is a 45W TDP increase, which is pretty high for going up 300MHz... Think about that for a second... Intel raised the FSB from 1333MHz to 1600MHz and the clock frequency from 3Ghz to 3.2GHz on the new Intel QX9770 from the QX9650... The TDP went up 6W (from 130W to 136W)... AMD's increase here is really high... What will the 2.8Ghz version that is coming out in Q1 2008 be? They are also planning a 3GHz version in the first half of 2008, so that should be interesting...
by the way...
Phenom 9900 is 2.6Ghz with 463 million transistors and has a TDP of 140W
Yorkfield 9770 is 3.2Ghz with 820million transistors and has a TDP of 136W