nismotigerwvu
Golden Member
- May 13, 2004
- 1,568
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A single title or line does not a review make -- I looked through those benchmarks for Phenom II and they are getting crushed by the new i7's and Anand is happy that the Phenom II can compete with the 2 year old (at the time) Core 2 Quads, though even the 9550 is still faster. With Bulldozer its also still slower and using 2x the power. They haven't released anything useful for mid-high end in 10 years.
Did you really read the article? Here's a quote 4 paragraphs down from where I quoted, "Here's how it breaks down. The Phenom II X4 940 is usually the same speed or faster than Intel's Core 2 Quad Q9400, and priced similarly at $275. There are some areas where the Q9400 will be faster than the Phenom II X4 940, so if you happen to use an application that runs better on Intel hardware then you've got your choice made out for you. But for the most part, if you're buying a quad-core processor at around $275 today, Phenom II will tempt you". Is it really noteworthy that the $999 i7 965, $562 940 and $285 920 and their $200+ motherboards were faster than the $275 and it's $75 mobos? The C2Q 9550 was a $~300 chip at the time as well and LGA 775 boards were still more expensive than AM2(+)/3 boards. Again, no stunner than the more expensive setup was faster. It isn't exactly like people are spouting that the Power 8 chips make the i7 line noncompetitive. It all comes back to that quote I'll leave here again, "A very smart man once told me that absolute performance doesn’t matter, it’s performance at a given price point that makes a product successful". Dollar for dollar, the Phenom II was more compelling at that time. Even more so when you consider the enormous performance boost a fairly dated AM2 based system could receive from dropping a 940 down in. No new mobo, no new RAM just a multigenerational leap in performance for that $275, which again was the cost of just a decent motherboard for one of those i7's.