AMD’s tripod wobbles the world wide wibble
Hardware Rounduppery Budget wonder or three-legged dog?
THE BIG NEWS TODAY is unmistakably the launch of DAAMIT three-headed monster, the Phenom X3, in its newest B3-stepping incarnation, and sure as the NDA claws loosen their grip on their prey, along comes a veritable deluge of reviews. Content-wise, the reviews point to pretty much the same – the X3 is performing just like an X4 with a core missing...
Things however seem to be split into 2 camps – those that think AMD has a winner, considering you can put together a decent-performing machine for, uhmmm... next to nothing - and those who think that AMD is really fighting an uphill battle at the moment and will keep on fighting until it drops of exhaustion. Whatever your preference, we’re pretty sure consumers will come out winners...
AMD’s Phenom X3’s in no particular order.
PC Games Hardware (Googlenglish)
Even though sites like Hardspell do a lot of cherry picking articles from legit sites and even go as far as writing over the watermarks on other people’s photos, they do publish (at least at first glance) some of their own material. In this specific case it’s a roundup of VGA coolers for the 96GT series of green goblin cards. This one provides some good figures on keeping your GPU cool. Read it if your card is a whiner.
Kyle’s crew managed to get hold of a couple of 9800GTX and performed some SLI tests on them. These big honkin’ cards draw enough power to light up small village, but their performance is second to none and pricewise Brent thinks it’s a much better deal than a CrossFireX 3870X2 solution. However, if you’ve already got an 8800GTX SLI rig, then you can just skip this one altogether. Carry on.
There’s a review (of sorts) up today at Inside Hardware that sounds quite interesting – it’s quite light with just a few numbers on the HD3850 X2, but just enough to see how it performs. The page doesn’t reference the resolution or details of the test system, but Nebojsa (not ours, another) says it’s quite good in overclocking which will put its performance on par with its bigger brother, the 3870X2. That being the case, and the price being right, it should be a winner. Read on.
MikhailTech has a review of Durapower’s CR-104. This is a memory card reader/USB hub/audio console that fits in your 3.5-inch bay, replacing the ancient floppy. It seems performance is quite fast (although we didn’t see the make and model of the controller chip). It is, however, beige, and the audio plugs aren’t colour coded. Read the review here. µ
Comments
Err...
The xbit labs article says they managed to overclock the x3 to a 3.1ghz, which ran stable. However they never benched the 3.1ghz against the rest of the cpus in the tests. Why not? I sure as hell would love to see the overclocked phenom against the core duos.a bit of responsibility wouldn't go amiss
Well, it's easy enough to tell the difference between a failure and a success:is it priced accordingly per core?
If no, and they expect you to pay the same amount for a 3 core as you'd pay for a 4 core, only then could you sanely throw in a comment like 'three legged dog'.
Maybe the wording of the manufacturing process involving disabling a core is confusing for some people? It's not the same as putting three wheels on a car that has a chassis made for four wheels.