X-Mas 2011: What did you get/are you playing?

[JSoftware]

Are you serious? Isn't that a rather daunting task even for a phone? But it would most likely beat Android pretty seriously, performance-wise.

It is, but I think it is possible. And I know it'll be fun trying at least

[code_glitch]

Oh, me, nothing much - just that new rig I wanted for a while. Turns out the old rana chips have a nice tendency to unlock to propus phenom iis so I'm ecstatic...

[LP]

By the way, since we are talking about gifts, I was thinking of getting a new rig too, but can't decide between AMD FX 8-Core Black Edition vs Intel Core i7 2600K. The last one is a bit too expensive for my taste, but is it worth the extra $$? Or should I wait for other options to come out?

P.S. Up until now I've been using my old Intel Q6600 passively cooled by Coolmaster Hyper Z600R, Mb Asus P5QL/EPU and RAM Patriot DDR2 800 with 4-4-4-12 timing (2.2V) and it's been a highly reliable machine to work with (have dual 1280x1024 monitor setup powered by XFX Nvidia Geforce 250 GTS, Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 and Sound Blaster Fatality). I'll also be looking for a new video card, but I find it difficult to adjust for a double (2x) PCI-EX power connector and using PSUs with higher than 500W ratings. Any suggestions would be helpful there too.

[code_glitch]

@Lifepower:

Heres what I wanted: for around £410
ATI 5770 1gb GDDR5 version from XFX
AMD Phenom II 960t
ASRock 870 Extreme 3.0
2x2GB XMS3 DDR3 1600Mhz
64 GB SSD

Heres what I got by shopping around the stock crisis around christmas for a cut under £350:
XFX 5750 1GB GDDR5 which I've OCed to 5770 levels, but I don't need that much more juice
AMD Athlon ii X3 460 which unlocks to phenom ii b50e
2x2Gb XMS3 DDR 1600
32Gb Kingston SSDNow

For the money, considering the floods in thailand, I find this pretty good value coming from the C2D and intel world... The best bit is this: when piledriver is released for socket AM3+, I'll just sell off my athlon for, say, £30, and buy that instead! Problem solved. And for the GPU? Crossfire in a 5770 since they're compatible.

One thing I can't help but notice with your i7 rig is this: balancing. Your i7 can play things at 700fps (or some stupid number) BUT your GPU cannot... Unless you got 2 GTX 460s which would blow your budget. From what I hear the FX chips are not bad, but where not what we were expecting so be warned there. Its i5/i7 level performance, heres what I'm saying in a few points:

AMD:
+ Cheap
+ Clear upgrade path: AM3+. Piledriver etc... Overclocking and unlocking, free GhZ for no $£$£
- Sometimes more heat
- Not always the highest performance
Intel:
+ Next Gen performance
- Expensive
- Upgrade path is... 'Murky'? LGA1366, P67 etc etc etc. Intel likes change. a lot.
+/- Can run hot...

On the whole I'm thrilled by how my athlon is putting up a fight with skyrim I'm getting some nice FPS at high settings (ok, I oc'ed my card for this one, buts here its the GPU that counts). Its your call, intel for the next lots of years due to cost, or a cheap swap in replacement every 2 to 3 years for AMD? But do you need things running at 100frames/sec more than vsync?

PS: DDR2 - DDR3 Is a MASSIVE boost. As is an SSD, words can't express what a 10 second boot is like (from cold to desktop).

[LP]

code_glitch, thanks a lot for suggestions!

Intel:
+ Next Gen performance
- Expensive
- Upgrade path is... 'Murky'? LGA1366, P67 etc etc etc. Intel likes change. a lot.
+/- Can run hot...

I actually have doubts about Core i7 for desktop because Core i7 840qm on my Dell laptop with DDR3 at 1333 Mhz is unimpressive. I'm getting mostly the same performance in WinRAR as my desktop machine (Q6600 with DDR2 at 800 Mhz), although in 1-threaded applications it is faster because of Turbo boost.

So AMD FX series are not that great after all? Maybe I should just wait for something better to come out or for prices to drop...

[code_glitch]

AMD FX series are not that great after all?

This is a touchy one and it has to do with the way bulldozer works. the FX 8 series is commonly thought to have 8 CORES. This is NOT the case.It has 8 MODULES, each is capable of handling one thread, but 2 modules share a few common components. If applications are not optimized you can have threads fighting for some resources that are shared while there are stacks of other available. Hence leading to sub-optimal performance in some scenarios.

HOWEVER - the FX8150 for example is not bad. Its just not as good as what was hyped, fact is that when you get that chip with all 8 threads running it can knock the living daylights out of just about anything else and the reason why is this:

Traditional 4 core (eg c2q, phenom ii x4...) have 4 cores, each with 1 set of resources each handling 1 thread.
Hyperthreaded 4 cores (eg i5s and i7s) have 4 cores, each with 1 set of resources each handling 2 threads
the FX and bulldozer chips have 4 cores - split into 8 modules. Each module has mostly separate resources, and some shared. In this sense it half way between true 8 coreness and 4 core hyperthreadedness.

Now, there is a controversy involved: Windows. A patch was released after MS found that I/O scheduling on the NT kernel did not scale well to this architecture and caused lots of performance losses. They then released a patch to attempt to fix this. HOWEVER this patch had to be withdrawn as it caused the kernel to become unstable. In other words, FX8150 - above a phenom ii x4 and x6 and somewhere between a really high end OCed i5 and mid-high end i7 however I hear intel is releasing another generation of i7s so I can't say for sure yet.

There is one thing you should consider though: a phenom ii x4 955 can trump a Q6600 at stock speeds. A phenom ii x6 will swamp a phenom ii x4 and a FX8150 will be up to 5% below a phenom ii x4 (from early reviews) in some tests and around 50% ahead of a phenom ii x4 in others. The problem with bulldozer is that its such a modern architecture virtually no code is optimized for it :|

I'll let you decide - but for the money the high end p ii X4s and X6s are amazing. Hell, even my ahtlon ii x3 is knocking on the door of i5s so you can;t go wrong I guess. Although for the bulldozer and FX scene, I think a LOT of people are going to be waiting for piledriver with phenom iis and athlon iis in their rigs for now.

A useful page you could use when looking at things would be this: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_look...6600+@+2.40GHz

Your c2q is the nice red box, look above and that SHOULD be better, your choice. I'm sorry for the long replies its just that I spent around 2 weeks non stop looking for info for my decision and things aren't as simple as they once where since bulldozer hit the scene...

PS. If you get an X6 or X4 with a t in the name eg (X6 1066t or x4 960t) it means it has turbo. And what are you going to be using it for?
PPS: Also worth noting - for AMD chips, hypertransport and ram speeds mean a LOT more than for intel. 1600MhZ ram FTW! Windows Experience Index is 7.2 of a max 7.9 for my RAM so I'm happy, you can't get much higher (says windows)

[LP]

to code_glitch: again, thank you for such detailed explanation!

So it seems that AMD FX CPUs vs Intel are in a way similar to AMD GPUs vs Nvidia, where AMD usually have much more processor units but with more limited capabilities. I also can't help but notice that there are many more models of CPUs both for AMD and Intel these days, which makes selection much more complicated.

Btw, do you keep the opinion that a high-end Core i7 has the highest performance? For usage patterns, sometimes I use main desktop for gaming, but most of the time it's used with Delphi IDE, and for executing multi-threaded research apps.

From what I've seen, WEI (windows experience index) usually takes into account the amount of RAM instead of its speed. Also, for some reason on most machines I've tried in Win7 the RAM score corresponds exactly to CPU score. Do AMD chips have hypertransport bus higher or equal to 1600 Mhz? Because for Intel it still seems to be limited to 1333 Mhz even in Core i7 chips. Also, how's the latency in 1600 Mhz RAM for random memory access?