Well I finally got a Phenom. I picked up a 9850 BE and it has been running for a bit over 24 hour now. I don't have enough results to base a opinion yet.

Great! Let us know how it is doing once the RAC has stabilized, and if you try any overclocking.

I am interested in its results as well as I am considering that CPU or any of its lower frequency brothers to replace my old 2800+

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Well I finally got a Phenom. I picked up a 9850 BE and it has been running for a bit over 24 hour now. I don't have enough results to base a opinion yet.

Great! Let us know how it is doing once the RAC has stabilized, and if you try any overclocking.

I am interested in its results as well as I am considering that CPU or any of its lower frequency brothers to replace my old 2800+

Well the RAC is on hold :( for now. Turns out that the 9850 is very picky when it comes to to motherboards that support it. The first board that I tried was an NVidia chipset and that ran for a day before it blew itself up. The second board was an AMD 780 chipset board that wouldn't run for more than a few minutes before locking up. I ordered a MSI K9A 790 chipset board that is listed on AMDs website as one of 2 approved boards for this chip and I should get it today or tomorrow. From what I read is the 9850 along with the 6000+ are not supported by most MBs because of the 125W TDP. So be carefull when you are thinking about upgrading to this chip. Both of the other MBs that I tried said that they supported Phenom CPUs but when you go to their web site the 9850 is not listed as supported. BTW the bios did recognize the 9850 just fine and I even tried to update the bios on both boards. I will post back after I get the new MB and have it up and running again.

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[quote]Well I finally got a Phenom. I picked up a 9850 BE and it has been running for a bit over 24 hour now. I don't have enough results to base a opinion yet.

Great! Let us know how it is doing once the RAC has stabilized, and if you try any overclocking.

I am interested in its results as well as I am considering that CPU or any of its lower frequency brothers to replace my old 2800+

The Phenom 9850 has been running for about a week now and it is doing pretty well. I think that it is going to be very comparable to my q6600. I have been letting them run Rosie nonstop to see how high of a RAC they can get. I really like the AMD overdrive utility. It is really cool.

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I'd love to see how the E8400 Wolfdale will do as a cruncher. Anyone using that currently?

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I would like to get some feedback on the Intel Q9450. With 12MB of cache, it should run much or Rosie in cache. The chip starts at 2.66 GHz so I would expect and easy over clock to 3.5 or 3.6 GHz. Add in some high speed 1066 RAM and this thing should fly. I think that will be my next build but not until the summer. Too many $$$ going to other things right now.

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Thx!

Paul

I would like to get some feedback on the Intel Q9450. With 12MB of cache, it should run much or Rosie in cache. The chip starts at 2.66 GHz so I would expect and easy over clock to 3.5 or 3.6 GHz. Add in some high speed 1066 RAM and this thing should fly. I think that will be my next build but not until the summer. Too many $$$ going to other things right now.

I have a Mac Pro with two Xeon Quads, Penryn Cores running at 2.8ghz each.

You can see my computer stats by clicking on my users name on the left. The Xeons are getting that RAC by being almost 24/7 (maybe 98%). That should give you an idea of what to expect.

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AMD PHENOM X4 9500 Quad core processor vs. an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor. Do both these computers have the same crunching power or is one better to crunch with (in general)? Both have 4 gig of ram and are around 700 dollars (intel processor is running 850.00 at Frys).

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AMD PHENOM X4 9500 Quad core processor vs. an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor. Do both these computers have the same crunching power or is one better to crunch with (in general)? Both have 4 gig of ram and are around 700 dollars (intel processor is running 850.00 at Frys).

Do the Q6600. At default settings Q6600 out performs X4 9600, so will beat X4 9500.

Q6600 easily beats my X4 9600 Black Editions (both OC'd 5-10%)

FWIW (and Who? used to call me an AMD fanboi, lol!):

The Nehalem Preview: Intel Does It Again

AMD never really caught up to the performance of Conroe, through some aggressive pricing we got competition in the low end but it could never touch the upper echelon of Core 2 performance. With Penryn, Intel widened the gap. And now with Nehalem it's going to be even tougher to envision a competitive high-end AMD CPU at the end of this year. 2009 should hold a new architecture for AMD, which is the only thing that could possibly come close to achieving competition here. It's months before Nehalem's launch and there's already no equal in sight, it will take far more than Phenom to make this thing sweat.



The Return of Hyper Threading

While Nehalem is designed to scale to up to 8 cores per chip, each one of those cores has the hardware necessary to execute two threads simultaneously - yep, it's the return of Hyper Threading. Thus our quad-core Nehalem sample appeared as 8 logical cores under Windows Vista:



Note that as in previous implementations of Hyper Threading (or other SMT processors) this isn't a doubling of execution resources, it's simply allowing two instruction threads to make their way down the pipeline at the same time to make better use of idle execution units. Having 8 physical cores will obviously be faster, but 8 logical (4 physical) is a highly power efficient way of increasing performance.

And if you're curious, this quad-core Nehalem running at 2.66GHz is within 20% of the performance of an eight-core 3.2GHz Skulltrail system. Equalize clock speed and we'd bet that a quad-core Nehalem would be the same speed as an 8-core Skulltrail here.


Final Words

First keep in mind that these performance numbers are early, and they were run on a partly crippled, very early platform. With that preface, the fact that Nehalem is still able to post these 20 - 50% performance gains says only one thing about Intel's tick-tock cadence: they did it.

We've been told to expect a 20 - 30% overall advantage over Penryn and it looks like Intel is on track to delivering just that in Q4. At 2.66GHz, Nehalem is already faster than the fastest 3.2GHz Penryns on the market today. At 3.2GHz, I'd feel comfortable calling it baby Skulltrail in all but the most heavily threaded benchmarks. This thing is fast and this is on a very early platform, keep in mind that Nehalem doesn't launch until Q4 of this year.