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

[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 HOWEVER this patch had to be withdrawn as it caused the kernel to become unstable.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)