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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."
Really, who doesn't know that AMD is higher performance per dollar.
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
which one is more more secure?
Its about your investment.. For me Phenom II was a no brainer because of AM2+ compatibility. Once newegg put those suckers at 200 bucks i jumped. Its like i have an entire new PC and that was upgrading from the 9600 quad core.
Oddly enough i didn't have complaints about the performance of the 9600.. i just figured encoding times and processing times would be reduced enough that it would accelerate my work and well, for 200 bucks its done so and more so than i expected.
i7 is a nice platform but i'm penny pinching right now and looking for better ROI vs bragging rights.
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.
Until electricity is free, comparing CPUs based on up-front cost of the CPUs alone ignores a major part of the expense of owning and operating computers, particularly if you're running servers.
But that's okay, Slashdot. I understand that you live in your parents' basement and you don't pay for electricity anyway.
What stood out to me is that AMD seems to have a fairly consistent price:performance ratio. Is this policy?
Most of their offerings fall pretty close to a line (not quite a zero crossing, but close). If this holds true for all their current and future offerings, you don't have to have test metrics for every processor. You can use price as a reasonable estimate of performance. i.e. Double the price gets you twice the performance.
Intel on the other hand, you can't trust price to indicate performance. A lot more research is involved. OR else you have to assume there's a high likelihood that the AMD offering for the same price will be better.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Buying a faster chip is a lot cheaper and faster than rewriting something to be multithreaded.
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.
0/0 gives me a headache. Have to keep carrying the zero.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
But buying a faster multi-core (as in, 3 or more cores) chip isn't going to do you any good if your application only runs on one or two threads.
Very true if your system only runs that single application. However, everyone I know runs multiple applications just by booting their OS.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
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.
Live Free
However, everyone I know runs multiple applications just by booting their OS.
But not everybody knows what their system is doing. I do: I always keep a CPU load chart in my KDE taskbar, and for interactive usage I probably use one core less than 3% of the time, and both cores about 0.1% of the time.
If I am transcoding a video, then one core gets pegged. However, I would never notice load on the processor on even with a single-core CPU if I just ran the transcode under "nice". It might take 3% longer to run because it waits for the interactive stuff, but that's insignificant.
But I don't run transcoding on my workstation anyway. Why? Because all the I/O continuosly flushes out my disk buffers for other processes. That makes my interactive apps seem slower than crap anyway because they have to hit the disk every time some of their data or program image gets flushed out. My dual cores do nothing to address that issue. I run transcode jobs on a server box where they won't bug anybody.
The only place dual core would really help most people with typical single-threaded apps is if they run at least two copies of programs heavy on number crunching but light on I/O and memory bandwidth, like $FavoriteCause@Home. Other than that, people will have to wait for multithreaded user apps to get much real-world benefit out of multicore CPUs.