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AMD Launches Budget Processor Refresh
MojoKid writes "AMD has again launched a bevy of new processors targeted squarely at budget-conscious consumers. Though Intel may be leading the market handily in the high-performance arena, AMD still provides a competitive offering from a price/performance perspective for the mainstream. HotHardware has a performance quick-take of the new 3.2GHz Phenom II X2 555 and 2.9GHz Athlon II X4 635. For $100 or less, bang for the buck with AMD is still relatively high."
Intel processors in lower-end price brackets might often score a win, but only if you consider the price of CPU alone. Intel GFX is crappy. There's Nvidia integrated GFX available...but for some reason the motherboards with them are usually quite a bit more expensive than AMD ones. Cheap AMD CPU with cheap integrated GFX offers best all-around performance - as good as any other setup for "daily" tasks, definatelly more 3D oomph than comparatively priced alternatives.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Um, of course you are entitles to your opinion. However, if you want to air your opinion in the public square and are not willing to share any details to back it up, you're no better then the crazy dude on the corner talking about the faeries that visit him at night..
Just to join in the fun; if you post your opinions on a public forum you are expected to back up your claims with examples and logic. If you cannot do so, either because of personal beliefs, or other restrictions such as NDAs, then do not post them.
Of course, while you are certainly entitled to your opinion, that alone worth little on a discussion board. The merit of this system comes from the fact that others may examine your arguments, and either adjust their own beliefs, or reply to your data with their own data. Saying you believe something and not backing it up adds little to the discussion; none of us know you, so we cannot judge if your opinion really has merit. And do not be too surprised when people start trying to interpret your post and "putting words in your mouth." That just means you didn't explain things well enough, so they had to draw their own conclusions.
While I do not believe you are trolling, I do think you completely missed the point of the comment system, at least for this topic.
You are right you don't have to justify anything you say on here. But unless your a complete moron you realize that you are on a website and seemingly engaging in some kind of conversation. During conversations you explain things.
Well if all you can come up with is variations of "IT SUX!" then don't be surprised if most of us out here think you are full of shit, okay?
After building a couple of budget AMD boxes for customers this lifelong Intel+Nvidia man couldn't be happier when he switched. For less than $750 after rebate I got a 925 Quad with 8Mb of total cache, 8Gb of DDR2 800MHz RAM, a nice 780V board that supports up to 32Gb, 1Tb of HDD, a 4650HD 1Gb, and dual DVD burners along with Windows 7 HP X64. And you know what? I could NOT be happier! This bitch chews through video transcoding like nothing, World in Conflict, Bioshock, HL2, Far Cry 2, all play nice and pretty with nary a slowdown, Windows 7 plays really nice with the new AMD quads and my boot and shutdown times are lightning quick, the quad is only 95watts and doesn't turn my apartment into a space heater, in fact it rarely gets over 105f and that is under full load for hours with stock cooling, under normal use it sits right at 83f, yeah this baby is nice and didn't break my wallet.
So I don't know what your problem with AMD chips was/is, especially since you won't actually bother to elaborate other than "IT SUX!" but I can say my customers can't be happier with the new AMD line. The bang for the buck is incredible, with $50 duals, $70 triples, and $99 quads, the new IGPs support just about every format for hardware acceleration out of the box so video is nice and smooth no matter how big a monitor they buy, much lower heat and power usage which helps keep the electric bills down, motherboards for AMD are less expensive for really good boards, all around it is just a really good buy.
So unless you are one of those that just has to have the largest ePeen, which in that case you shouldn't have been looking at anything less than a $1000 Core I7 chip anyway, I just don't see what the problem could be. I could add an AMD 5xxx to my PC and play any game I want with out a problem, and for a PC that cost less than $750 that is saying a lot. I could easily see myself still using this machine 5 years from now simply because it has room to grow if I need to, but frankly everything I have thrown at the 925 has just gone off without a hitch, so I really don't see the need for any bigger. And many of my customers are "Joe Average" and are quite happy with their new AMD duals and Triples, and just rave to their friends about "how fast" everything is and how nice it all runs.
Lets be honest here-for most folks PCs passed "good enough" quite a few miles back and with $99 quads anybody can have ludicrous speed at their fingertips. Even my 67 year old dad is running AMD quad right now, and couldn't be happier. While he didn't really need all that power I figured at that price it was better to give him room to grow, and with this he can watch videos and chat and do whatever he wants and never even hit the chips hard. All that for a PC that cost less than $600 after rebate. Man you just can't beat that!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
This sort of thinking creates PC games that tell the player to hit the "X" button to do something, only it actually means the left mouse button because it was X on the console. It also results in FPS games with horrible console-like auto-aim on devices using a mouse and keyboard, and games that needlessly reuse keys because the original controller was too limited for all of the functions the devs wanted to do.
Console ports require more thought than "recompile with a different target".
I read the internet for the articles.
If nothing else AMD serves to counterpoint Intel from being a monopoly. Further they actually make some pretty good chips.
I support AMD because they keep Intel in check. And as a bonus their chips aren't that bad.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Again this silly fight between AMD vs Intel.
When people are going to learn performance _depends_ on what you're going to process?
I remember, few years ago, having a server we had with an Athlon XP 2600 (its real clock was 2.1GHz AFAIR). A perfectly speedy machine for desktop usage, but as a server (pure CPU-load in that case, no I/O bottleneck) it was having a real hard time. We eventually replaced that machine and old 4x Xeon (P3-based, 500MHz), and things went to normal.
I already suspected what the problem could be, so I've decided to make a test replacing - temporarily - the Xeon-based server with a Sun Ultra 30 (1xUltrasparc II @ 300MHz).
Well, the Sparc not only survived the test, but also kicked hard the Athlon's ass. Still, as a desktop machine, the Sparc was mediocre.
The difference was that the Sparc had 2MB L2 cache, while the Athlon had only 256kB (even with 2x bandwidth and lower-latency RAM). In _that_ case the L2 cache made all the difference. Per MHz, the Sparc also won, by large margin, the Xeon machine (1MB L2 for each processor).
Athlon's (pre-64) performance compared to P4 (sorry, I don't have an i7 to compare against a X4) varies. For desktop usage the Athlons felt snappier in general, but with some performance "hiccups" when you started to tax the machine more. The P4s felt slower overall, but the performance seemed to be more homogeneous.
Which one was better then? Well, that's a good question. I personally preferred the "slower but smoother" P4, but Athlons were fine and I could recommend both processors for home usage,
You know what really, really suck?
Those benchmarks they publish around.
I mean "XYZ fps in Crysis"? mp3 lame encoding time? Synthetic benchmarks?
Those say nothing to me. Run some database benchmark, or measure the time it takes to compile the Linux kernel using all cores at once... Or move GBs of data in the memory N times etc. Then it might be interesting.
Wow, tell us more about the stupid sheeple, oh insightful one!