connchri
Daemon Poster
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- Scotland, UK
I don't think it's that underrated. I think the view a lot of people have of the phenom is that it's old tech that's basically being taken out and driven to the max (remind you of anything - Prescott P4???) . And the reality is that's the truth. It runs so hot, and it's nowhere near as overclockable as a core 2 duo. You can get about 30-40% more juice out of a core 2 on stock cooling. You'd be best getting the marsh mallows out for the phenom.
As for the benchmarks, a similarly clocked core 2 quad will wipe the floor with a Phenom in 90% of real world benchmarks. Not with synthetic ones, not so easy, but as I hinted with my previous post, thats due to the integrated memory controller, and synthetic benchmarks are no subsitute to real world application benching.
Even the 9950BE, AMD's flagship, is in a good number of real world tests slower than the dudes E8500 dual core. And the tests that the 9950BE is way ahead are mostly ones that would take advantage of the quad cores opposed to the C2D two. That annomaly then makes you go back to the slower quad v faster dual question.
I'm not dissing the Phenom as a defunct and useless CPU, it's just not as good. Especially for the enthusiast.
As for the benchmarks, a similarly clocked core 2 quad will wipe the floor with a Phenom in 90% of real world benchmarks. Not with synthetic ones, not so easy, but as I hinted with my previous post, thats due to the integrated memory controller, and synthetic benchmarks are no subsitute to real world application benching.
Even the 9950BE, AMD's flagship, is in a good number of real world tests slower than the dudes E8500 dual core. And the tests that the 9950BE is way ahead are mostly ones that would take advantage of the quad cores opposed to the C2D two. That annomaly then makes you go back to the slower quad v faster dual question.
I'm not dissing the Phenom as a defunct and useless CPU, it's just not as good. Especially for the enthusiast.