Slashdot Mirror

Not that the comparisons count for much, but it's disappointing that Slashdot's headline says "Notably Improved" when Firefox won the three previous comparisons and finished second this time:

  * Grand Prix 7
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-7-web-browser,3037-17.html

  * Grand Prix 8
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-17-firefox-10-ubuntu,3129-18.html

  * Grand Prix 9
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-17-firefox-10-ubuntu,3129-18.html

True, Chrome (19.0 points) regains the lead from Firefox (18.5 points). Firefox was the last winner of Tom's Hardware Web Browser Grand Prix, and Firefox has been good with memory for several versions now. The improvement that Tom's Hardware talks about is Chrome now has HTML5 hardware acceleration for Windows (since Chrome 18). That is the news, not Firefox's low memory usage.

The summary elegantly avoided the most important metric - Page Load Time. Ok, so let's see how we're doing there:

IE9 - fastest
Safari - 2nd
Chrome - 3rd
Firefox - 4th
Opera - 5th

The page load time tests are the same eight pages in our startup time tests: Google, YouTube, Yahoo!, Amazon, Wikipedia, craigslist, eBay, and Wikipedia.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-7-chrome-20-firefox-13-opera-12,3228-6.html

embedded or not it doesnt help since ie9 has a ram of 1276 with 40 tabs in that TH's chart. Firefox is not embedded and they win which proves that even if a software is embedded or not it all comes down to the devs or the code in other words.

Loving my Model B Pi, but can't help thinking that there's a niche wanting filled for systems that can actually function as a near normal desktop. Something with more grunt, more RAM etc.

What about nettops, then? Okay, they cost more than the Raspberry PI, but you get a fairly decent, low power and small footprint desktop computer that can run your OS of choice while being a more than competent HTPC.

For what it's worth, I've been using a ZOTAC ZBOX HD-AD01 for more than one year as my main computer (while much more capable hardware is mostly gathering dust) and just the other day Tom's Hardware compared seven of them in great detail.

RT.

And tell them to go find something else to work on. Firefox is officially trash now, never used thunderbird (but I don't know anyone else that does either so whatever) and I know I for wont be touching firefox os after seeing how bad the browser platform has gotten in the last couple years.

Firefox is the least ram hungry browser available! Chrome and even IE 9 last year kicked Firefox 4 ass in on a silver platter. However, the quality is considerable better for their browser at least.

I installed FF 3.6 on a machine to test something and it was PAINFUL and slow to scroll and ram and disk hungry. I was so used to it for so long I forgot about what made Chrome so special in 2009 - 2011 when people started using it.

I still feel comfortable using it and if Mozilla fixes just a few more things I may just switch back to using it.

It will come without a battery charger

Reformatting and using all of the usual software to try to remove the virus didn't help at all!

Wow! Must be one of those magic virus that hides itself somewhere in the computer that survives wiping the hard drive. Either that or you are the most incompetent tech ever. I wouldn't take a recommendation for scam PC clean-up software from the world's most incompetent computer tech.

Actually they do exist, mostly as bios viruses. Here is a toms hardware article about just such a case. I do tend to agree with you that he doesn't seem like the most competent tech, just thought I would point that out.

Toms hardware and other sites have done extensive tests of these hybrid drives with a very mixed bag of results. Usually they are still an order of magnitude slower than SSDs, and only achieve their near-SSD perf after it's been 'trained' for a while on the data.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/momentus-xt-750gb-review,3223.html

And for all the complaining on here about SSD failure rates, wouldn't the lifetime of the solid-state memory units in a hybrid drive be even worse because it's a much smaller block of memory and therefore must swap much more data in/out of the total capacity? What's the point of a hybrid drive if the caching part is likely to fail much faster than the SSD equivalent?

I finally made the jump to buying an SDD and have a 180gb Intel one coming from Amazon's super-sale last week. I'll be installing my OS on it and using the procedure that many others have used with great success. Maybe you can find some real solutions to some of your counter-arguments there:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/70822-ssd-tweaks-optimizations-windows-7-a.html

After having my work laptop with one, I simply am amazed at how much more real-life usable my machine is. Waking from sleep is near instantaneous and I know longer wonder if it's worth it to wake my machine and wait 20 seconds to check something out before walking out the door. Batter life is nearly doubled. I don't hear clicks as the drive parks itself every time it gets a chance. I don't have to worry about josteling or even *dropping* the laptop while it's on. It's honestly the most amazing upgrade to PC technology and usability I've seen in years. Beats any graphics card upgrade since first going to VGA and proc upgrade since the original Pentium.

Sure, it's life might be shorter; but I've been watching my hard drives have shorter and shorter lives too. Warranties are no longer 5 years, they're 2 if you get that. Out of 5 seagates I've owned in the last few years, 3 of the 5 have died. One of the replacements even died. I switched to hitatchi's and have done better. So, and SSD won't make any different to the regular backups I do now anyway.

We tech nerds often forget it's about the usability stupid. Usability as your mom and girlfriend see it. I.e. - you turn it on and it works. You don't see all kinds of cryptic mysterious stuff happening, or cross your fingers and hope something works. You press the button on the appliance and the toast comes out. Until we really grock that - these arguments are pedantic to non-techs who are just as likely to toss an old computer or give it to the kid because it's getting slow or the drive dies in it.

Well there's Toshiba too.

(That was simply the next manufacturer I plugged into Google after assuming Samsung and Motorola will probably not, because of their ties to Android. So that's at least two current tablet makers who have announced Windows RT tablets. So if you respond with "Only two", you can safely assume I'll come up with others. I seem to recall HP and Dell have expressed an interest too, just off the top of my head, making me think you'll probably see RT tablets from most major PC makers.)

If anecdotal evidence on SSDs scares you perhaps you should re-review Google's hard data on hard disk failures. Certain brands of SSDs are already many times more reliable than hard drives if looking at failure rates over time. Hard drives are no more reliable. You will find plenty of anecdotes in NewEgg reviews of people buying x number of hard drives and y number of them arriving DOA or dying in 3 months.

http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en/us/archive/disk_failures.pdf

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923-6.html

Heh. I don't see how being a single core and using as much juice (and getting as much performance) as a dual core, is an advantage.
I guess it depends on the app and on how you measure performance.
But what helps Atom compete is the 32nm. You might be comparing to a Cortex A9 or somesuch like the guys at Anandtech do.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5365/intels-medfield-atom-z2460-arrive-for-smartphones
That's comparing a 32nm chip to a 45nm one (formerly 65), and a design that dates back to 2007(!)
Unsurprisingly the newer, smaller, chip is more power efficient.

The Cortex A15 is going to hit the market in a couple of months and double ARM's performance.
Then there's 20nm next year.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/arm-20nm-soc-processor,15893.html

Intel's only option is to keep shrinking the chip, but so far it doesn't seem to be doing it fast enough.

Every FOSS driver is effectively misuse from the perspective of a warranty, because the driver could do something to the device the manufacturer didn't approve."

... also, following your line of reasoning, using Windows is misuse from the perspective of warranty, because the driver could do something to the device the manufacturer didn't approve. You did know that computer manufacturers don't have control over what code Microsoft releases, right? Surely you don't think that AMD approved the Service Pack 3 fiasco?

"As a resident of the USA, how can I get one of these things?"

Wait a month and get a Via APC instead.

For $14 more than the Pi, you get twice as much RAM, a better operating system (a flavor of Android 2.3), a better CPU, 2GB of on board flash for your OS (and of course it has the obligatory MicroSD slot as well), plus standard VGA and HDMI out, 4 USB ports, 10/100 Ethernet, and standard audio in/out jacks.

The video probably isn't quite as good as the Pi (it maxes at 720p), but who is going to be doing sophisticated video with these devices anyway, at this stage? It's a hobbyist board.

So I'm sorry friend but there really isn't a point in ePeen cards unless you are just going for bragging rights or are doing serious GPGPU work because the games just ain't stressing the systems that hard.

This page has benchmarks for that card with modern games. The 4850 seems to average 30-40 fps in most games at 1680*1050 (Crysis 2 was worse), the benchmarks there don't show a minimum (which is usually about half the average). That's a bit crappy.

I run at 1920*1200, and thinking about getting one of these soon, so will be running at 2560*1440. This page shows benchmarks for Crysis, a game that is 5 years old.

I don't brag about my computer, I don't care about my "ePeen".

So I'm sorry friend but there really isn't a point in ePeen cards unless you are just going for bragging rights or are doing serious GPGPU work because the games just ain't stressing the systems that hard.

This page has benchmarks for that card with modern games. The 4850 seems to average 30-40 fps in most games at 1680*1050 (Crysis 2 was worse), the benchmarks there don't show a minimum (which is usually about half the average). That's a bit crappy.

I run at 1920*1200, and thinking about getting one of these soon, so will be running at 2560*1440. This page shows benchmarks for Crysis, a game that is 5 years old.

I don't brag about my computer, I don't care about my "ePeen".

How do you damage a server merely by sending it too many requests? Surely it should just shut down if it overheats?

What if it has an AMD CPU?

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hot-spot,365.html

Who are they hoodwinking? Just recently, a US judge ruled that you cannot identify a "pirate" using an IP address. They appear to be preparing to flog a dead horse, right?

I'm going to retract that.

I just looked at the latest CPU hierarchy charts and the conclusion is: "...we're almost-shockingly left without an AMD CPU to recommend at any price point".

Strange times, indeed.

No, it's really much slower, particularly in double-precision:
Nvidia cripples GPGPU in Geforce GTX 680
Benchmark Results: Sandra 2012
NVIDIA GTX 680 Reviewed: A New Hope

The reason for making an account is so that you're notified when you receive a reply. Further, when someone is considering whether or not to respond to you, they'll have some level of confidence that you'll actually see their response. Why go through the trouble of writing something useful to an AC who won't read what you're saying?

As for your issue: just get a new computer, all you need to know is how much money you have, and then follow one of these:
$650: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/build-gaming-pc-overclock,3159.html

$1200: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/build-a-pc-budget-overclock,3160.html

$2650: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i7-3930k-overclock-radeon-hd-7970,3158.html

Most of your problems are likely just Vista. Win7 has ironed out most of Vista's problems. Buying a PC is not as complicated as it once was, and is also far FAR cheaper than it has been in the past. Don't waste your time researching parts for trivial performance gains, just buy items off these guides according your budget and call it a day.

The reason for making an account is so that you're notified when you receive a reply. Further, when someone is considering whether or not to respond to you, they'll have some level of confidence that you'll actually see their response. Why go through the trouble of writing something useful to an AC who won't read what you're saying?

As for your issue: just get a new computer, all you need to know is how much money you have, and then follow one of these:
$650: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/build-gaming-pc-overclock,3159.html

$1200: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/build-a-pc-budget-overclock,3160.html

$2650: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i7-3930k-overclock-radeon-hd-7970,3158.html

Most of your problems are likely just Vista. Win7 has ironed out most of Vista's problems. Buying a PC is not as complicated as it once was, and is also far FAR cheaper than it has been in the past. Don't waste your time researching parts for trivial performance gains, just buy items off these guides according your budget and call it a day.

The reason for making an account is so that you're notified when you receive a reply. Further, when someone is considering whether or not to respond to you, they'll have some level of confidence that you'll actually see their response. Why go through the trouble of writing something useful to an AC who won't read what you're saying?

As for your issue: just get a new computer, all you need to know is how much money you have, and then follow one of these:
$650: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/build-gaming-pc-overclock,3159.html

$1200: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/build-a-pc-budget-overclock,3160.html

$2650: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i7-3930k-overclock-radeon-hd-7970,3158.html

Most of your problems are likely just Vista. Win7 has ironed out most of Vista's problems. Buying a PC is not as complicated as it once was, and is also far FAR cheaper than it has been in the past. Don't waste your time researching parts for trivial performance gains, just buy items off these guides according your budget and call it a day.

I've seen it rumored in more than a few places that Tom's Hardware is very Intel and Nvidia, shall we say, "friendly".

That would explain why in their most recent Best Graphics Cards For The Money AMD's cards only won 5 categories compare with Nvidia's massive win in 1 category (plus a tie in another and 3 categories with no winners). Basically if you ignore all the times that they say good things about AMD, then it is obvious that they favour Intel and Nvidia.

As for the original poster claiming big differences in the rankings, I just don't see it. If you filter out the cards that are not tested on both sites you get the following rankings:

Battlefield 3
Toms: 680GTX-SLI, 690GTX, 7970CF, 6990, 590GTX, 680GTX, 7970, 580GTX
Anan: 680GTX-SLI, 690GTX, 7970CF, 6990, 590GTX, 680GTX, 7970, 580GTX

Skyrim
Toms: 680GTX-SLI, 690GTX, 7970CF, 590GTX, 6990, 680GTX, 7970, 580GTX
Anan: 680GTX-SLI, 690GTX, 590GTX, 680GTX, 7970, 580GTX, 6990, 7970CF

DiRT 3
Toms: 680GTX-SLI, 690GTX, 7970CF, 680GTX, 6990, 590GTX, 7970, 580GTX
Anan: 680GTX-SLI, 690GTX, 7970CF, 590GTX, 680GTX, 6990, 7970, 580GTX

Metro 2033
Toms: 7970CF, 680GTX-SLI, 690GTX, 6990, 590GTX, 7970, 680GTX, 580GTX
Anan: 7970CF, 680GTX-SLI, 690GTX, 6990, 590GTX, 7970, 680GTX, 580GTX

Only Skyrim seems to show any major differences, and that was probably due to some driver issues, game version or alternative testing methods.

They seem to have merely omitted the games which favor AMD more strongly. Compare, for example, the Metro 2033 benchmarks (or BF3, or Skyrim) and you can see that they are relatively similar. THG did not test Crysis or Total War: Shogun 2, which the AMD cards perform better on.

I think if your monitors had the passthrough ports then all you would need would be 2 DisplayPorts on the video card.

I did the How To at http://www.amd.com/us/products/technologies/amd-eyefinity-technology/Pages/eyefinity.aspx
and it recommends a 6850 or 6950 (I have) for a 4 monitor setup.

Were you thinking of the 5870 Eyefinity Edition which actually has 6 DisplayPort outputs? I believe the 6000 series and up have the newer DisplayPort for daisychaining.

This guy used a 6950 with 4 odd monitors - http://www.uberreview.com/2012/03/amd-6950-eyefinity-review-and-how-to.htm
But he used all the ports instead of daisychaining DisplayPort only.

Here they say 6 monitors are good with 2 DisplayPorts if you have daisychaining monitors.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/309846-33-eyefinity-monitors
"DP 1.2 monitors have 2+ ports, with which you can connect up to 3 monitors in serial. Two ports on the card, so 6 monitors that way. You can do this only with native DisplayPort 1.2 supportive monitors. No DP-DVI dongles work. "

Only for varying degrees of "capable":
Nvidia cripples GPGPU in Geforce GTX 680
Benchmark Results: Sandra 2012
NVIDIA GTX 680 Reviewed: A New Hope

This guy already did... http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Minecraft-Calculator-Graphing-MaxSGB-Scientific,15109.html.

This is the beauty of AMD, Intel and others going into details of why they are technically superior in a certain way. Then when cornered they say: yeah we're about the same but you can get a "faster" chip from us a little cheaper than the other guy. CPUs have become commodities in most people eyes: how much "make it go" do I get for my $200?

For what an average desktop neeps in gov't, you don't need to spend $200 on a CPU. Intel makes several CPU's that are capable of basic gaming for $80-$100.

Really? I have not used a Bobcat, do I don't know much about them. Cool to know that they can actually play games - maybe that's why they are responsible for most of AMD's sales (or profits, or both - I forget).

Bulldozer sucks and I agree with you about their through use of the Phenom chain. And while they do it to a certain extent with Bulldozer, there's no excuse to disable extra cores phisically. If I could buy a FX6100 and try to turn it into a FX8120, then they would have a much more attractive product. I have never won extra cores in the AMD lottery, but why they would deliberately remove such a fun "feature" is a mystery to me.

Didn't MS already implement the scheduler fix on Win 7 via a hotfix? It saw gains of about ~2% overall - see http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-7-hotfix-bulldozer-performance,3119-6.html Which means Bulldozer will suck forever. Piledriver seems better, though, according to http://www.techpowerup.com/img/12-04-10/79a.jpg That's if such table is trustworthy, and it's doubtful, given that they didn't even get the FP/GHz percentage gains right.

A roundup of reviews from the usual major sites as well as others not mentioned in the summary above: Overclockers Review, Anandtech Review, Anandtech Undervolting/Overclocking, HardwareSecrets, Bit-tech, PCPer, Tweaktown, Hard OCP, The Inquirer, Techspot, Computer Shopper, Tom's Hardware, ExtremeTech, PC Mag, Overclockers Club, and Guru 3d

As the article correctly points out, at $1200~ 1980 dollars that is around $5000 today!.

Close, but about $1000 short

How is an eBay auction today relevant to the adjusted price of a [computer] in 1977?

As the article correctly points out, at $1200~ 1980 dollars that is around $5000 today!.

Close, but about $1000 short

I think more importantly, Sandy Bridge has been in scant supply for several months due to a recall. ...

Ummm, no. The recall was back in January of 2011 and was fully resolved by April of 2011. This is April, yes, but given that a year has passed between that April and this April, it is safe to assume that the recall induced issues are well behind us.

Any shortages of Sandy Bridge at this point would be more likely related to OEMs allowing current inventories to drain prior to the official release of Ivy Bridge based products.

Except hard drives *are* getting faster because, at a given RPM, transfer speeds are almost exclusively a function of areal density. That's why performance charts closely track capacity, with the notable exception of the 10k RPM drive there at the top which probably still has a high areal density as well. And if you think the seek time of HDDs are high, you don't even want to think about tape. Nothing (new) to see here. Move along.

I suspect that iOS is a bit more vulnerable on the web browser side, as android has a fair bit better sandboxing which means an exploit of the browser takes more work to fully p0wn the phone, while in iOS-land, 'p0wn the brower == p0wn the phone'

Safari on iOS runs in a sandbox. Exploits against iOS-Safari have always required combining two bugs, one to p0wn Safari and a second to break out of the sandbox.

This has been done, successfully, in the past.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/charlie-miller-iphon-hack-jailbreak,2710.html

Naturally, both of those old bugs have been patched, and as of now there are no known ways to break the sandbox from within the browser. All current jailbreaks require local access.

Because it's lightweight

In what sense is Chrome lightweight? Of the five major browsers, Chrome is the second biggest memory consumer and it comes bundled with Flash, which I personally don't have a use for.

I agreed with his review as well. Frankly I found his tolerance far exceeding my own when it comes to GNOME3. Pretty much everything he said on the "Why it Failed" page is spot on. I thought this was insightful regarding their target demographic:

So, when the power users are leaving, GNOME doesn't really seem to care. After all, GNOME 3 isn't designed for them. But what the GNOME Project leaders don't seem to understand is that new Linux users are like vampires, or werewolves, or zombies. Stick with me here.

New Linux users don't just spontaneously pop into existence, they have to be "bitten" by someone who is already involved. Average Joe, who needs to use his computer and doesn't care how it works, doesn't wake up one day and, out of the clear blue sky exclaim, "You know what? I think I'm gonna screw around with Linux today.” New users are typically converted by a friend or family member who gets them set up and interested.

By gutting GNOME of every power user-oriented feature (a functional desktop, virtual desktops, on-screen task management, applets, hibernation, and so on) it's losing that intermediate-to-advanced crowd that's responsible for bringing users on-board. The power user demographic isn't going to recommend and support GNOME 3-based systems if they've already jumped ship.

Just how does GNOME intend to put the GNOME Shell into the hands of new users? By chasing away its current base with a brand new interface designed to be "easy," and with no clear strategy for acquiring an easy-seeking audience, GNOME simultaneously shoots itself in the head and foot.

And finally:

Using GNOME Shell is an exercise in supreme frustration. After spending the first month with this interface, I wanted to crawl into a corner and die.

Just the reaction the GNOME devs were hoping for, no? I kind of wonder how long Fedora will stick with it given that.

The second month we discovered shell extensions.

This is on the last page of the article. At the end of my first month, after having given GNOME 3 a fair shot, it wasn't cutting it and I switched to XFCE (switched back, really, since I had used the much simpler XFCE years ago back before GNOME 2 got up to speed). So I didn't get the chance to discover these extensions in my second month. Had I read this first, I might have gone down the tweak road described here instead.

Yes, you have to rectify AC before it powers a computer, but the rectification costs less than 1% of the energy

No, actually only commercial transformers that form part of our electricity grid are generally that efficient. Most PSU transformers in computers are generally about 70% - 80% efficient. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/strong-showing,987-38.html

So by moving to a single transformer that powered the entire datacenter rather than an average datacentre containing 1 or 2 transformers for each PC there is the potential to save a lot of energy. The fact that many servers have dual redundant PSU's in case one fails means there is ever more scope for improvement as a transformer costs energy to run even if nothing is drawing energy on the DC side.

By consolidating the transformers by building you make it more cost efficient to spend the extra money and use a transformer that gets closer to the efficiency you mention.

There are also serious distribution advantages in 3 phase electricity, but it is not used because of the extra complexity, despite being cheap.

Not sure about you guys in the US, but here in the UK we use 3 phase power, it is just that each home only connects to 2 of the phases. You can get a 3 phase supply to your premises though in certain circumstances .

http://www.ukslc.org/articles/power/3_phase_power_explanation_200706152153.html

An interesting side effect of this can be seen if you ever have a partial power cut. Often only one or two phases will fail so you end up seeing every third house that either has power or does not. This is because they try and structure it such that alternate houses connect to different phases in order to balance the load across them evenly.

DC distribution is expensive, and 1% gain is just not enough to pay for it. Once we have intelligent grids, the situation may be different, but for now there is just no business case.

Nobody is talking about DC distribution, just about moving to a each server within a datacentre being supplied in DC. The datacenter itself would still get an AC supply from the grid, they would just convert it to DC centrally.

BTW - Here in the UK we call the device that converts AC to DC a transformer :)

It is a bit to blame just those three. Look at the publishers.

Take the company who made Unreal Tournament: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Consoles-PC-Games-Unreal-Gears,10437.html
PC gaming is dead and we left the sinking ship, they said. PC gaming, if it lives will be, lol, Farmevilles on Facebook.

Of course a year later they are back to targeting the PC as the primary market: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-08-16-epic-games-working-on-five-new-titles talking about being wary of "betting their company" on every game produced in a market that is Halo, COD and Gears.

Now that Mozilla has decided to have Firefox look and behave almost exactly like Chrome, but without being as fast or memory-efficient as Chrome

This is correct. Firefox isn't as memory-efficient as Chrome. In fact, Firefox is more memory efficient than Chrome: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-17-firefox-10-ubuntu,3129-14.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Raspberry-Pi-Eben-Upton-RS-Components-Premier-Farnell-Linux,14851.html I would say the popularity is not a question... A lot of people still want a small, cheap and open computer, and there is no one in that market space.

Spinrite doesn't appear to work on drives larger than 500GB as it uses a 16bit integer to count the number of cylinders. I'm in the process right now of trying to get data off one of my dying WD15EARS drives, and have confirmed that crash right when the cylinder count rolls over. HDD Regenerator seems to run, but has wrong numbers in the sector counts because it (apparently) uses signed 32bit integers.

No matter how many articles come out that show Firefox's memory management to be competitive there's always going to be clueless trolls like you that are stuck in an infinite loop. Trolls to say something stupid and trolls to mod it Insightful.

Why don't you tell Adam he doesn't know WTF he's doing: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-17-firefox-10-ubuntu,3129-14.html

Toms hardware suggests the i5-2500K (4 core, 3.7Ghz turbo) for $224.99 or i7-2600K (4 core 3.8Ghz turbo) for $324.99 as comparable.

Tomshardware never tested the FX-8120, so that's a lie. They tested the FX-8150 and found:

In the very best-case scenario, when you can throw a ton of work at the FX and fully utilize its eight integer cores, it generally falls in between Core i5-2500K and Core i7-2600K

The FX-8120 has 500 MHz lower base frequency which is far more significant than the 200 MHz lower max turbo. Not many have tested it but xbitlabs did:

I hope Tom's hardware wasn't recommending the 2500K or 2600K for virtualization. Those models are unlocked for over clocking but have the virtualization extensions disabled. I just ran into that when evaluating processors for running vmware.

For example, I just set up a couple servers from COTS parts. They used AMD FX-8120's (8 core, 4.0Ghz turbo) for $199.99/ea. It seems the comparable Intel is the i7-980 (6 core, 3.6Ghz), which is selling at $589.99.

Modded informative? Only on slashdot... Also you compare turbo speeds (and GHz is silly anyway due to the difference in IPC), yet say:

The servers actually use as many cores as I can throw at them, so it's extremely beneficial to have more cores at high speeds.

If all cores are 100% loaded, you're not going to get anywhere close to max turbo. That's the extra boost it can give if only one core is working.

Toms hardware suggests the i5-2500K (4 core, 3.7Ghz turbo) for $224.99 or i7-2600K (4 core 3.8Ghz turbo) for $324.99 as comparable.

Tomshardware never tested the FX-8120, so that's a lie. They tested the FX-8150 and found:

In the very best-case scenario, when you can throw a ton of work at the FX and fully utilize its eight integer cores, it generally falls in between Core i5-2500K and Core i7-2600K

The FX-8120 has 500 MHz lower base frequency which is far more significant than the 200 MHz lower max turbo. Not many have tested it but xbitlabs did:

Slower eight-core modification, AMD FX-8120, looks even less convincing, because it has significantly lower clock frequencies. In terms of performance, this processor ranks even below the quad-core competitor solutions. Moreover, FX-8120 is also slower than the top previous-generation AMD CPU - Phenom II X6 1100T.

So just admit it, you use AMD because you like AMD but clearly you have no clue what the competition offers.

It's even more ridiculous than that. My motherboard automatically overclocked my 2500K to 4.3GHz.

It's even more ridiculous than that. Tom's boys say that by overclocking it a little, you might even make it more efficient.

Could be time to switch back for the same reasons.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/macbook-air-chrome-16-firefox-9-benchmark,3108-18.html

Our testing of everything up to quadcores says that clock for clock, AMD made mincemeat out of Intel.

Tom's Hardware disagrees. Basically, the newest AMD K10 cores are about on par, clock for clock, with a 2006 Core 2 Duo, and get the pants beaten off them by Nehalem and Sandy Bridge.

Now, should I believe Tom's Hardware, or some random Slashdot poster named "postbigbang"?