Deneb is exposed

I would be willing to bet money it isn't, unless the system was in a fridge

 

Alternatively, it could be that they were using some fans with serious airflow. This would, of course, also indicate some serious noise.

 

I'd suggest the temperatures are meaningless, how were they measured?

 

Even realtively minor process variantions can make changes to voltage/lifetimes - do you know the characteristics of the process being used here?

 

I doubt they characterized or designed the process to run much higher than 1.3 volts. at 1.5 and above EM will be a major factor, etc. if you upgrade every 6 months you might be ok, but beyond that, nope.

Dave its physics, at the geometries we are talking about 1.5 and above will have issues.

 

The 75W ACP ("95W" TDP) Shanghai chip already has a default vCore of 1.35V.
As with the Phenoms there might be minor variations, but I've never seen a Shanghai CPU-Z so there you go.

So what you'd think the 105W ACP ("125W" TDP) 2.8Ghz SE part will have as a core voltage? 1.4V?

Surely that's not safe for servers already, ey?




The temps are more accurate than not, based on the reasoning that Crysis does not tax 4 cores at 100% (the temps were with Crysis benchmarks; 33 and 38 degrees for 1.55 air and 1.6 water respectively) However, with 1.35V as a reference, 1.5V-1.55 would likely give you ~150W, which the Cooler Master heatsink used would dissipate with a 18 Degrees Celsius delta compared to ambient temp (Tested by Frostytech on LGA775, but it's about the same).

 

Looks like for punters the new AMD 45nm process will be a lot better than previous AMD offerings against Intel.

 

Didn't realise that, gotta admit I've used a lot of Phenoms but been a while since I looked at anything AMD beyond the benchmark numbers.

 

Well, personally I'm building an AMD based system. I don't know if it was the confirmed Phenom II support for the mATX motherboard I was looking at, or the $50 cheaper motherboard with equal features, or the $30 cheaper processor with equal performance that did me in... Now, if I was wanting to spend another $200 I'd probably have went with Intel but to be quite frank I much much rather have a GeForce GTX 260 or HD4870 1Gb and a Athlon X2 5600+ than a Core 2 Duo E5200 and HD4850. Toss in the fact that down the line my upgrade path is going to be very similar (higher end Core 2 Duo vs Phenom II) and it wasn't a hard choice other than getting over the "oh noes I won't be teh uber 1337" stigma around AMD processors right now.

 

Sounds quite reasonable. I've had difficulty recommending Phenom to any my clients and confidants, but Phenom II is a whole different ballgame.

Unless the only game you play is MS Flight Sim, you're better off getting a faster graphics card as you've said.

 

Yeah, if you want a cheap, but still decently powerful GPU AMD is definatly the only way to go right now.

Most of us as enthusiasts think £150 for a CPU is rock bottom so all we see is Intel but most regular people would prefer to spend <£100.

I was looking for something in that pric range for a friend the other day and by far the best bargain I could find was the X2 5600 at about £47. Even after throwing in a new mobo and 2GB of RAM it was still coming in about the same as the cheapest decent Core2 CPU.

And an X2 5600 is still more than enough to handle any game out there as long as you have a decent GPU.

 

Is Phenom 2 competitive with low end i7? This pricing leak suggests so.

 

exactly. I was more radical and went with the AMD single core (very low power, cheap and much faster than the athlon XP it replaced), there's a lot of upgrade options. such as a cheap 3Ghz K10.5 with 2x1MB L2 coming mid 2009, or a triple core.

 

I think you should go look at actual benchmarks. You seem to think the performance differences are greater than they actually are. Your type of thinking is what causes someone to buy a E8400 and HD4850 instead of a E7300 and GTX260. If you actually care about your gaming experience and not about how you'll look on online forums then the choice is easy.

I had a Core 2 Duo E6300 from basically day one of the Core 2 launch. If I hadn't of sold that system it would still have given 99.9% of the gaming experience a new Core 2 Duo would. But again, when I can spend $150 on motherboard, CPU, memory vs $270 for a similar performing Intel solution. Only when you spend that extra $200 for that extra .1% does Intel make sense, but that's just wasteful, I rather buy 4 new games instead and actually enjoy my hardware.

Call me crazy but I laugh at those who buy Intel + HD4850, it's just not the right gaming first choice.

 

I'm not sure where that came from, I was agreeing with you!

 

It doesn't take $270 to get an equivalent Intel system, not when the E5200 is cheaper than a 5600+ (and faster, overclocks better and uses less power), unless you think an Intel MB costs $120 more than an AMD one.

 

The 5600+ gets put into combo deals, the E5200 does not. Using combo deals on Newegg is the absolute best way to save a lot of money. Without them my current build would be about $900 instead of $700.

 

Some gaming results for the Shanghai Opteron:

Good performance on UT3:

http://www.gamestar.de/hardware/tests/prozessor/1951279/amd_phenom_ii_x4_p3.html

but disappointing results for COD4, even losing to the original Phenom:

http://www.gamestar.de/hardware/tests/prozessor/1951279/amd_phenom_ii_x4_p4.html

Caches are paramount to gaming so Phenom II sees massive improvements in UT3. Seem like there are some platform issues to resolve when it comes to gaming from the latter test. The PCIe interface on that mobo is probably not so ideal for the GTX280, nor is the slow ECC server ram in general. Reminds me of what happened to the original K8; while the Opteron wasn't so hot in gaming benches, the Athlon 64 was great.

 

I don't remember that actually, they sold the opteron as "Athlon FX 51".

 

You dont need to use ECC ram with S939 opterons (not sure about 940) so performance was identical to S939 A64s assuming equal cache...so your statement about Opteron not doing well in gaming is totally inaccurate.