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THG Labs In Depth With AMD Spider
The Last Gunslinger writes "Tom's Hardware Guide has published detailed results of their laboratory analysis of AMD's recently released Spider platform, including the Phenom 9500 and 9600 running on 790FX chipsets. Amongst other interesting details, the 2.4GHz Phenom 9700 has been pushed back to Q1 2008. The 2.3GHz Phenom 9600 benchmarks on average 13.5% lower than Intel's Q6600 quad-core CPU...and the MSRP for the Phenom is about 13.6% less as well. Much is made of the AMD OverDrive utility, by which the THG labs were able to OC the Spider platform by 25% (3.0GHz) using air cooling alone."
My blog
For Gord's sake, not THG... They're well-known for accepting "tips" in the past, have a horribly laid-out site that favors 90% ads with 10% content, and their reviews are anything but "in-depth", catering for the lowest denominator. I also love it when they draw brilliant "conclusions" that contradict their own data.
THG is a wart on the face of internet journalism, in fact, it can't even be called that. Unfortunately they still have too much weight for $ome rea$on.
Tom's Hardware agreed to the terms of AMD's carefully-managed benchmarking sessions. Way to drink the Kool-Aid, Tom's. Anand stuck up for his own integrity as a reviewer and produced a much better review of the chip. Moral of the story: If you want a Phenom X4, wait for the B3 stepping!
Since THG managed to inflate this a wee bit too much, here's a quick summary of what's new:
- Up to eight processing cores (one quadcore cpu, four single-core graphics cards)
- Targeted, of course, at the enthusiast market.
- Weird bug when running >2.3 GHz. Top-End model (Phenom 9700) not available until very later on. Disabling L3 Translation Lookaside Buffer fixes this and costs some 10% performance.
- (According to THG) processors some 13% slower and cheaper than corresponding Intel models. Graphcis performance has more variations, nVidia stays undisputed performance king, with it's relatively new 8800 GT being arguably the best midrange choice.
- Up to 42 PCIe 2.0 lanes total; Graphics via 2x16 or 4x8.
- Power-efficient Northbridge (some 10 Watts of usage) and GPUs (especially in 2D mode which is, thanks to Aero, Aqua and Compiz, slowly disappearing)
- Lots of critizism for stability problems in testing systems (not too troubling) four days before launch (troubling).
Long story short: AMD, thank you very much for trying, I'll stay with, and continue recommending, Intel/nVidia.
Unfortunately the stability of B2 chips past 2.3 ghz has been called into question thanks to problems with the Transition Lookaside Buffer (TLB). Anandtech was unable to get their B2 chip stable past 2.6 ghz despite the fact that it would run at speeds as high as 3 ghz. It is telling that reviews on AMD's supplied system (like Tom's) did not include any real stability testing of the much-touted 3 ghz B2 stepping Phenom X4.
HotHardware has some pretty extensive coverage of the platform and new Phenoms as well. There's a lot fewer pages to sift through and more data on performance.
This seems an odd move by AMD. I thought that multi-gpu systems were a complete failure? Take a look at Valve's recent hardware survey:
Multi-GPU Systems (1073 of 269297 Total Users (0.40% of Total) )
NVIDIA SLI (2 GPUs) 880 82.01 %
ATI Crossfire (2 GPUs) 193 17.99 %
So only 0.4% of Steam's users had a multi-gpu system. Maybe this segment is actually profitable, but it's hard to imagine that with such low numbers.