My poor Phenom. It's time to step it up, AMD. You're a great choice for overall performance-per-dollar, but watching that i7 920 trounce the 965 BE in every benchmark despite a 800Mhz faster clock speed is getting old.
i know right? i love amd for their great prices and awesome price/performace, but i almost wish they'd pull an intel and release a couple ridiculous procs (both price and performace).
@Bandit5317. Uhm... I'm still on X2 4200+ and have problems justifying CPU upgrade: most games play fine and H.264 playback is smooth too.
I do not encode video. CD ripping (with AAC encoding) is fast enough. Nor do I run synthetic benchmarks.
Why waste money on something I cannot utilize fully?
P.S. Actually only thing which might me make the upgrade - to e.g. i5 - is the lower power consumption. Though in context of PC upgrade, the savings would be immediately /wasted/ on faster GPU.
The thing about video encoding is that you probably aren't in a terrible hurry. If you rip an entire season of something, it's going to take a while to transcode. It doesn't matter how fast your rig is. It's going to be a long batch process. So speeding it up a little bit is not necessarily that exciting.
running the same x2 4200+, and even the power savings is wasted when you buy a new proc on the price processor itself. If you're happy with the performance (i am), then why mess with a good thing?
I'm not saying that everyone needs the power, I just think AMD can do a better job when it comes to performance/Mhz. If I'm honest, I don't really need the power right now. I've only been able to get my Phenom II above 75% CPU usage in benchmarks and while running Dolphin (I don't do video editing or codec conversions). Up until now, AMD has been able to do a good job with the price/performance ratio on their CPUs, and they still are with some of them, but the Core i5 is a serious competitor for the Phenom II X4. I might be able to accept the clock-for-clock performance differences between the two if the Phenom could overclock like the Core i5, but it can't. All you have to do to overclock a Core iX processor is continually bump up the base clock and the voltage until the temps threaten to damage the CPU. With the Phenoms, it's almost backwards. Before you do anything, you have to cool these things WAY down. You're only going to see 4 Ghz if you can keep the load temps at a maximum of 30*C. The weird thing is that you can do that on a Phenom without increasing the voltage at all to make it stable. Basically, as long as their cold enough, they're stable regardless of voltage (to a certain point, of course). Based on what I've read and my own experience with a 955 BE with C2 stepping, you hit a brick wall at about 3.8 Ghz on the stock cooler. You can throw as much voltage as you want at it after that, it won't have any effect other than to make it run very hot, which is counter-productive due to the way these things overclock. A Core i5 or i7 on the other hand will be just fine running at 4.4 Ghz and 70*C. A Phenom is capable of that speed, but not before spending some serious cash on cooling upgrades. In summary, I think AMD has been making progress in the last couple of years, but all of their recent processors are really only competitive with Intel's last-gen processors (Core 2 series). I'm hoping that AMD can make some serious headway in the near future with a 32nm manufacturing process and 6-core CPUs which they will hopefully be able to keep compatible with the Socket AM3 motherboards. /rant
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My poor Phenom. It's time to step it up, AMD. You're a great choice for overall performance-per-dollar, but watching that i7 920 trounce the 965 BE in every benchmark despite a 800Mhz faster clock speed is getting old.
@Bandit5317
i know right? i love amd for their great prices and awesome price/performace, but i almost wish they'd pull an intel and release a couple ridiculous procs (both price and performace).
@Bandit5317. Uhm... I'm still on X2 4200+ and have problems justifying CPU upgrade: most games play fine and H.264 playback is smooth too.
I do not encode video. CD ripping (with AAC encoding) is fast enough. Nor do I run synthetic benchmarks.
Why waste money on something I cannot utilize fully?
P.S. Actually only thing which might me make the upgrade - to e.g. i5 - is the lower power consumption. Though in context of PC upgrade, the savings would be immediately /wasted/ on faster GPU.
@Dummy00001
The thing about video encoding is that you probably aren't in a terrible hurry. If you rip an entire season of something, it's going to take a while to transcode. It doesn't matter how fast your rig is. It's going to be a long batch process. So speeding it up a little bit is not necessarily that exciting.
@jedi
I do encode video. My old P4 rig took 20 minutes to compress a 5 minute segment to MPEG for a DVD.
My new Q8300 rig does a 5 minute segment in 2.5 minutes.
So... compressing an hour-long DVD in Adobe Encore used to take 4 hours... now it only takes 30 minutes.
Every little bit helps.
@Dummy00001
running the same x2 4200+, and even the power savings is wasted when you buy a new proc on the price processor itself. If you're happy with the performance (i am), then why mess with a good thing?
@Dummy00001
I'm not saying that everyone needs the power, I just think AMD can do a better job when it comes to performance/Mhz. If I'm honest, I don't really need the power right now. I've only been able to get my Phenom II above 75% CPU usage in benchmarks and while running Dolphin (I don't do video editing or codec conversions). Up until now, AMD has been able to do a good job with the price/performance ratio on their CPUs, and they still are with some of them, but the Core i5 is a serious competitor for the Phenom II X4. I might be able to accept the clock-for-clock performance differences between the two if the Phenom could overclock like the Core i5, but it can't. All you have to do to overclock a Core iX processor is continually bump up the base clock and the voltage until the temps threaten to damage the CPU. With the Phenoms, it's almost backwards. Before you do anything, you have to cool these things WAY down. You're only going to see 4 Ghz if you can keep the load temps at a maximum of 30*C. The weird thing is that you can do that on a Phenom without increasing the voltage at all to make it stable. Basically, as long as their cold enough, they're stable regardless of voltage (to a certain point, of course). Based on what I've read and my own experience with a 955 BE with C2 stepping, you hit a brick wall at about 3.8 Ghz on the stock cooler. You can throw as much voltage as you want at it after that, it won't have any effect other than to make it run very hot, which is counter-productive due to the way these things overclock. A Core i5 or i7 on the other hand will be just fine running at 4.4 Ghz and 70*C. A Phenom is capable of that speed, but not before spending some serious cash on cooling upgrades. In summary, I think AMD has been making progress in the last couple of years, but all of their recent processors are really only competitive with Intel's last-gen processors (Core 2 series). I'm hoping that AMD can make some serious headway in the near future with a 32nm manufacturing process and 6-core CPUs which they will hopefully be able to keep compatible with the Socket AM3 motherboards.
/rant