9950 AMD Overclocked it not what you think - Page 2

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This has been a tumultuous time for HW, as we see the main OS switch kernel/driver, 32bit to 64, cpus going to MT, or multi core, and all the SW has to catch up. Hopefully, MT will come sooner than expected, but even so, theres always going to be serial threads, no matter what, and hopefully game engines wont have many

Yep, although IIRC, the server version of 7 will only be available in 64 bit, and I would bet that 64 bit will be the majority of systems sold.

I agree with you much of the time, but I think that people see you as playing loose with the facts when you try to put Phenom head to head vs. Core 2 or Deneb vs. Nehalem. What I see you as actually attempting, is to look at it outside of the AMD vs. Intel box, but from a different angle that doesn't always work.

Phenom's not as good for games as Core 2. That's a fact regardless of whether it's the Spider platform, or Nvidia SLI motherboards. When you look at it outside the box and try to ascertain whether a particular graphics card reaches it's full potential alongside a Phenom, then you make the relatively small mistake of saying GPU instead of graphics card; and that hurts your argument in the minds of some of the enthusiasts here.

The GTX280 is the single fastest GPU. It's not the single fastest graphics card, the dual GPU 4870x2 is. I agree that the issues could get worse once June 2009 and new ATI graphics cards arrive with new GPU's (whereas Nvidia's refresh as of late has been the same GPU on new graphics cards with minor improvements). B3 Phenom might not fare so well, Deneb should fare a bit better, but Nehalem should fare best -- even if it's not as good for gaming as Penryn.

I'm convinced that some Phenom's at stock equal older Intel dual and quads in the same price range in games, and outperform Intel duals in apps optimized for more cores, but when those Intel CPU's are overclocked, it changes. Enthusiasts here are waiting to see if Deneb stock matches Yorkfield overclocked, and if Deneb overclocked matches Penryn. That's true even of the few of us who don't overclock. It's simply wanting to see the best that can be gotten out of the CPU. Right now, B3 is good only for those of us who don't overclock.

Everyone pretty much agrees that Nehalem will outdo Deneb on SOI. Maybe a later high k version will do better, but AMD won't be back in the enthusiast CPU game until the next architecture meets the successor to Nehalem head on. That's far enough away that it's not even good speculation; just hope.

AMD is going in the right direction. They're improving their CPU's incrementally vs. their older CPU's, while finally matching 2 year old Intel tech. That's all we can hope for outside of really good chipsets and fantastic GPU's on some amazing graphics cards. At least many of the Intel fans here buy ATI if they want the best.

I support AMD, only buy AMD and am really more of a realistic budget gamer and video enthusiast who roots for the underdog and doesn't mind all that Arab dosh going to AMD, while admiring the work done by Israeli designers on Intel CPU's. If AMD were not hurting and there were still ATI chipsets for Intel, I might actually build a C2Q system, but that's not a reasonable course for me now. Besides, I'm used to pins on the CPU, not the motherboard!

Just try to explain things better when you think outside the box in attempting to give Phenom it's due. Be fair to Core 2 and Nehalem. The 7% criticism others made seems valid. Deneb won't improve drastically on B3 and Nehalem won't be as gamer oriented as Core 2, but the success of one is not the failure of the other as the metrics are different. Let the Core 2 people complain about Nehalem's "mere" 7% if they like. If it fails in games, it fails vs. Core 2 and not Deneb.

Most of us can't do our own comparative benchies, and the ones that do tend to support the sites that show Phenom as a budget choice for a few apps, but behind most of the time. Sort of like P4 losing to Athlon 64, or Pentium D losing to Athlon X2. The times have changed and it's AMD in the "must prove it's worth" hot seat. Sadly, all those wins with tech didn't translate into more cash for the future, plus the purchase of an overvalued (but ultimately very valuable) ATI hurt AMD. IMHO, they will take about 2 years to gradually get back in the game CPU wise.

Me, I'll still buy AMD. I love my triple cripple (do I owe 1/10 of a cent to TC for that reference? Has he patented it yet? ).

The 4870x2 seems to need 30" monitors to be viable. The days are gone when someone can have a budget board and CPU with a high end graphics cards. GPU's are getting to the point where they need to be matched with the right CPU and monitor to get any value. Sort of like a market niche. If you can't afford what it takes to bring out the best in the card, then don't kvetch about how CPU limited you are with a budget CPU and board and a 19" monitor.

Nehalem better, or higher clocked Denebs if AMD still wants a total platform. After all, the rumored 2009 release of new AMD graphics cards with next generation GPU's should push things even farther to the extreme. Will we see the next ATI dual GPU card perform as far beyond the 4870x2 as it does vs. the 3870x2? Hope so, even if I can't afford the CPU or monitor (or the card itself )

The observation that i7 didn't appear to do anything with single-threaded games - of the past - does not make it useless for gaming in the near future - where the door to multithreading is open real wide. You buy a CPU for the future, not for the present. But I feel none of this is the main issue for the gaming industry. The main things setting back PC gaming:

1) Piracy. So many gaming enthusiasts are also familiar with torrents and disc emulation; if developers don't get paid, what's the point of sweating to write them in MT or GPGPU? On the flip side, GPU makers might start subsidizing game development, but there are high pragmatic obstacles with doing that in large scale (it just hasn't worked too well before).

2) Shortage of creative genius. Gameplay is a much better alternative to modernized eye candy. The former is what makes games so addictive and sell so well. Eye candy is just a recipe for quick initial sales (and hardware sales); when too many developers resort to this, overall sales don't go up.

3) Programming talent/management. Unlike what may be portrayed around here, game code is not static and inflexible. With skillful coders nowadays, one can stress the CPU, or the GPU, or both in any reasonable mix, without greatly altering the look of the game. GPUs are already almost able to run games on their own, though not with optimum serial performance.

4) Slow overall economy. Economic slowdowns most hurt disposable income; people first cut spending on luxuries. Gaming is entertainment, which for many people goes under luxury. Fortunately for the industry, and probably stemming from lots of work into making games addictive, many people treat gaming as a necessity.

As you have mentioned, it takes years to develop a game engine. Mispredict the direction of CPUs/GPUs in the next few years, and you release a game engine that, in its few years' lifetime, fails to optimally use gaming hardware.

As far as CPU direction, I feel both AMD and Intel are equally to "blame" for the multicore rage. In the last three years, they've been one-upping each other with multicore implementations. Pentium D. Athlon 64 x2. Core 2 Duo. Core 2 Quad. Phenom. i7. The only difference in this race is Intel once switched from one architecture to another, with a huge one-time gain in single threads. All the rest from both camps is die shrinks, minor tweaks (as it pertains to ST), and cache expansion.

I don't in particular see AMD heading in the right direction for gamers, if multicore is ruled out. Since the Athlon64 days, even though you might not have noticed because Pentium 4 was so far behind, AMD has been porting server hardware to the desktop world. They release server chips, followed by matching desktop chips in a few months. At the least, you get technology a few months dated. At worst, it's optimized for server usage patterns and makes a paltry showing in games and DT apps. We see some of that in Phenom. Deneb looks to repeat the server-desktop release pattern, and every source is telling me that it's a very straightforward die shrink, with extra L3 over Phenom, and soon a DDR3 controller with no mentioned improvements other than the obvious over DDR2. That's not a miracle, dear. Foundries have been shrinking dies since forever, and they used to get better results out of every node.

But you can't blame AMD for catering to servers. They've probably made most of their profit from server, not consumer sales, and it's likely much more lopsided now that their highest end desktop CPU goes for <$180. Competition brings lower prices, but employees are rarely going to take pay cuts, so the byproduct is less development work tailored to your market.

With Intel, at least Pentium 4 and Core 2 were both meant for consumer-level use, never minding that Core 2 was for mobile and generalized at the last minute because P4 really sucked scaling up. i7 is their first release that appears to be server improvements, though they don't say that. I suppose if you imagine i7 to be a 6-core chip, then the predicted stagnation in ST gaming and comcomitant rise in MT would appear quite reasonable for a first release? Had Phenom initially matched Brisbane in ST with increased core count, how many here would have called that a very successful launch. Even though it would've accomplished nothing for ST games.

This is not Intel's argument. It is ATI/Nvidia's, and I used it (somewhat sarcastically, who demands 4x AA on a 30" LCD?) only to point out an overreaching statement about the power of the 4870x2 - it's powerful, not infinitely powerful, so let's not paint it as what it is not. So how are GPU makers going to get us to pay premiums for 4870, G260/280, 4870x2 if we don't have any intentions of playing with high resolutions? Will these cards handle games farther out into the future, at reasonable resolution? This is actually a difficult question. You can have a powerful card, but it can't run DirectX 11. CPUs are pretty general-purpose and frequently last for years, but GPUs are rather fixed in their features, making it hard to keep up with games and not upgrade them every year.

Any multi-GPU environment benefits greatly from a CPU that has a high overclock ceiling. The proof is in the numbers. It can be 3dmark or *insert game name here* and they continue to produce more FPS. Why on earth would anybody run a 4870X2 or a GTX280 SLI setup with a CPU that pee's down its leg when you attempt to overclock beyond 400Mhz? I understand brand loyalty but why spend the $$ on the GPU's and go "economy class" on the CPU? C2D rules the gaming CPU world and I dont think i7 or Deneb are going to repaint the scenery until developers start writing games with multi-core platforms in mind but dont hold your breath. Almost everything seems to be born in consoles and ported to PC anymore.

AMD needs to ratchet it up to force innovation. Intel will end up fat, lazy and happy similar to Nvidia until the 4000 series slapped them in the face. I would REALLY like for my next build to be an AMD machine but if its just "slightly better" or "economical" then forget it. I have zero intrest in a product lined up to compete with 2 year old offerings. I want it designed to CRUSH ALL current offerings of their own and their competitor.

Now don't get me wrong here. I will and have went AMD for family and friends that need a computer and are on a very tight budget. Get a nicely featured MATX board and a decent little 64X2 CPU and your about done spending money.

From what I've read of Nehalem, that's the direction Intel's going in too. The days of desktop CPU's vs. server might be history. Perhaps that's why Nehalem's increase over Penryn in games has been reported as less than the increase in apps? It's now up to developers to match the capabilities of newer CPU's. With games, that may take longer, as many games are ports from consoles.

Games aren't totally recession proof, and piracy makes it hard on those of us who buy, but I'm glad I paid for lifetime memberships for my wife and I in LOTRO. We've gotten our main characters to lvl 50 and have done only about 60% of the game. Once we get Mines of Moria installed, it will be a relatively inexpensive way to hang out with our several mixes of characters. The most fun, believe it or not, is she has a female Hobbit minstrel that my male hobbit minstrel adopted as his daughter. Minstrels might be squishies, but they are really powerful squishies.

At max resolutions maybe. At 1024x768 (on non capped games), you will get ridiculously high FPS which is bottlenecked by the CPU. You can use that as a testing means. Most crossfire/sli systems (at high resolutions) leave the CPU as the bottleneck though.

I think we can all agree that the cake is indeed a lie.

As soon as Portal was mentioned i knew it would come to this^.

I generally shudder whenever I hear people mention an FPS game and any kind of story or plot in the same sentence, but I'll agree to HL2 having a good story because the developers at least tried to include one and for the most part did a decent job. I remember a while back reading an interview done with the developers of Bioshock where they said that they had wanted to include an intricate plot but eventually decided to "dumb down" the game and eliminate most of the storyline because they were afraid that some gamers would find it boring. Personally I find this idea appalling.

The sad thing is that many gamers today don't realize how good we had it back in the day in terms of games having great stories. I still say that anyone who wants to see how good storytelling can get in games needs to go old school and find a copy of one of the Gabriel Knight games.

Just an Engineers is getting nostalgic.

For gods sake just don't start talking about Amiga 500 games ...

For me the game era really took off with the Sierra Games when I got a 286 with VGA ... all those blue? floppy disks were a bit of a bummer tho.

Some great adventure and good enthralling stories somewhat excused the chunky graphics.

I don't see any improvement in that regard and while bling is great you get sick of FPS unless there is a great story.

I did like Unreal 2 ... the awakening ... thought that was a good story.

What is with the latest games stuff my kids have now?? They are all creating little creatures on their PC's ... have been for weeks. Spore ... and now Fable (which better suits me on 360)

None of them want to FPS lan with me anymore ...

Am I the kid now ... oh no.

The Portal that I liked was the old show on Tech TV. That made MMO's seem fun and helped me get over the idea that they were lame compared to single player titles like Morrowind and Oblivion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal_(TV_series)

Then Tech TV became G4 (aka Dreck TV) and it went downhill. I miss the old Screensavers too. Even when they have good anime, like Serial Experiment Lain, they have too many softcore dumb commercials aimed at college aged guys who can't get girls to behave like that for them.

Don't these people realize that us old guys loved Tech TV and spend lots of money too?

That said, I never enjoyed an FPS, though I tried both Doom and Wolfenstein, then I tried FarCry later on. Overall, it's CRPG's that have a decent plot and the MMO's that seem to work better for me are the ones based on literary works. I still remember an article from 1997 or so asking if RPG's were dead, due to the rise of early FPS and RTS's. Then Daggerfall, Baldur's Gate and the original Fallout brought the genre back. The best single player CRPG plot wise, in my opinion, was Betrayal at Krondor. Nice graphics for the time too. Still play it and Daggerall under Dosbox every year just to revisit the memories.

Timing is everything. When I was finishing my degree, the corporations were coming to my Uni, pulling kids out in their 3rd year of MechE and starting them @ $55~60K with a deal to go back to school in a few years and finish their degrees on the company dime. I was on a similar deal....on a form of 'sabatical' from my organization, earning my bachelors while still receiving full pay & benefits.

^Its even worse now. Only way to have a job these days is through a intern scholarship sort of thing. A freind of mine signed up and got one for Intel and after he finished his AA he started a job for them making about $40-$50K/year.

I would have done the same but my problem is I don't like the details of components as much as I do like building PCs and that sort of stuff.

^Whats really sad about that is that the illegal immigrants stay while the ones like those who get sent back are trying to work. But I live in a bad place for that so its a big topic.

Underclocking wont save on my power bill. My fiance runs my old PC 24/7 and its a old P4 EE 3.4GHz. So no real way to underclock it I guess.

Similar to my experience. I don't have a technical degree, and I spent the first 15 years of my working life as a library assistant, but my hobby allowed me to switch careers and certifications helped. Now, I'm working for a major corporation and brushing up on statistics for a 26 hour six sigma class (haven't had a need for statistics since 1978, and then I still only got a C in Statistics for the Social Sciences).

Still, when I took a couple of graduate library science classes in the late Eighties, I noted that seniors with social science and humanities degrees were still landing jobs. Corporations were looking for them as well as management and business admin. When I graduated in the early 80's, it was at the start of a recession. I bet the corporations weren't looking for those social science grads when the 92 recession hit.

Since the contract I'm on is secure for a few more years, I expect I'll ride this recession out better (and I was smart enough not to buy a house -- renting is more flexible if a neighborhood goes south due to illegal immigration and aging apartments and townhouses).

Capitalism is boom or bust. Not much in between. Eventually graduates who might have to work in a restaurant for a year (like I did) eventually get jobs that aren't that bad. I was paid at the national average for library assistants when I started and it paid the bills for years as a decent clerical level job. While telephone tech support wasn't that great when I switched careers, data center work has been good to me.

^Yea I know. But that has made it harder for us too. They want previous experience which normally come in under paying or non-paying internships.

What a shocker... You mean that quad cores with intermediate clocks aren't as good in primarily single threaded games as higher clocked dual cores?! You do realize that the same is true for Intel right? The E8XXX C2D's are generally faster than the Intel quads in all of the games that aren't written with multithread support.

What exactly are you trying to prove here DELETED?

Reminds me of the summer I worked as a janitor at my old high school before starting college. The union janitors back in that Pennsylvania school district made more than the starting teachers.

Then, I moved to Texas to avoid the early 80's recession right after college. Well, the janitors aren't making $60 an hour here, this is a "right to work" state. That translates as the right to have few rights. LOL

Right, and a link showing the Phenom X3 being 10 - 20% slower in 5/6 games is proving your point?

What does this have to do with C2D/C2Qs? I was commenting on the fact that Phenom X3 is generally still a bit slower at gaming than the K8 X2s, something yipsl supposedly disproved with his link, yet it shows the X2 6400+ some 10 - 20% faster in many games... go figure.

Anyway, as for the duals vs quads argument, I agree with you, its been done to death, I think I stopped posting in those threads after the 3rd or 4th time of posting pretty much the exact same message, looks like the search function is beyond the grasp of some people...

The only problem with the link yipsl provided is how many will be able to OC to 3.2GHz with a Phenom X3? While the person could get a Athlon 64 X2 BE and OC to higher than 3.2GHz with good air cooling.

So yes when they equal clock speeds it will probably perform the same, maybe better. But considering that not everyone does have a SB750 and they chances of a good OC are not 100%, the best choice for a AMD fan is a X2 for gaming.

Then you shouldn't be able to find any thing good to say about AMD's
phenom chips under the same standard you are applying to intel.

That's my point,some people can find some crazy excuses for AMD and hold
Intel to a completely different standard, their both chip makers so the same
standard should apply to both companys.