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Phenom IIs, Core I7-920 Win Out In Value Analysis
An anonymous reader writes "We've all seen processor benchmarks, but how do today's enthusiast CPUs look when you account for performance per dollar? Using a smorgasbord of charts, scatter plots, and performance tests, The Tech Report attempted to single out the highest-value offerings out of 16 popular Intel and AMD processors. The results might surprise you: AMD's 45nm Phenom IIs (both triple- and quad-core) prove to be strikingly competitive with Intel's Core 2 Quads. And, on the high end, Intel's $266 Core i7-920 turns out to be a compelling step up despite the higher costs of Core i7 platforms in general."
It is wrong to compare performance/price because this assumes price scales linearly with performance, which is clearly false. Nobody expects to get 50% more performance when they pay 50% more. But if there is a $100 process having a performance of 1000, then we would normally consider it an excellent deal if we could pay $150 for a performance of 1300. The value for your money therefore scales in a non-linear way, and it's better to just have everyone look at the scatter plot and choose their own price point based on their personal internal scaling function. The core i7 has the greatest discontinuity in jumping ahead of the rest of the crowd in this regard.
I recently had to make the tough choice of a Phenom 2 vs Intel Core Quad. I went with the Intel because I somehow came to the conclusion that they run cooler.
You see, I'm building a recording PC, so I want to have as few fans as possible. I plan on having a huge heatsink with NO fan. Most reviews, if they focus on heat, focus on the overclocking aspect.
If wattage correlates to heat like I think it does, I may have been better off with a Phenom 2. But, then again, the wattage test was only run during one task in this review. I read another review where it was different.
There just aren't enough review sites out there for... ahem... "grown ups". Maybe I should start one that takes a look at performance with DAWs like REAPER.
In the end, I don't care about best performance per dollar, or wattage per dollar. I care about performance per degree of heat, because heat = noise. Performance of modern CPUs is good enough these days.
Oh well, that's my rant of the day.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
I just redid my system line by putting an e8400 in my desktop, where I mostly game. I switched out a Phenom 9600 (cause the tlb erratum for vista x64) to my file server/media center (which runs Ubuntu). and really as this graph will tell you: fast dual-cores are going to blow away slow quads in gaming because most games are not programmed for multiple threads and take advantage of a higher clock core. However, for most other tasks I do, like compiling the Linux Kernel (I run gentoo side by side with vista), the Quad Core Phenom 9600 seems to be much faster. Plus, I had a hard time overclocking the 9600 to anything past 2.6 ghz whereas the 3.0 ghz stock e8400 easily clocks up to ~4.0ghz on air. I should also note that I picked the e8400 over the q8200 because of the virtualization tech as I do alot of virtual systems for testing.
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AMD is the loveable underdog, but don't forget how expensive their X2s were when they were dominant. AMD isn't cheap because they're doing us a favor, they're cheap because they have to be.
That's a thing that people don't seem to get - prices are what they must be in the market. The question is, can you skim off enough to keep designing new chips and developing your foundries? Already they've failed at the latter and is trying a huge bet trying to make a foundry company spin-off. No matter how badly they're really doing, in the "here and now" they'll be competitive right up until they file for chapter 11.
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