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- Date:
- Monday , November 19, 2007
- Author:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
AMD Phenom & Spider vs Intel QX9770
AMD's native quad core Phenom desktop processor is finally here accompanied by the 790FX chipset that makes up the AMD “Spider” platform when used alongside the Radeon 3800 series video cards.
Spider Motherboards
As talked about on the previous page, Spider is AMD’s platform for their Phenom brand of CPUs. And it is worth stating that all current AM2 socket processors will work on these AM2+ motherboards as well. The 700 series AMD chipset will be lead today with the launch of the top-end enthusiast chipset named the AMD 790FX. Following with be other 700 series chipsets with less features, so as far as Spider motherboards go, we will be seeing the most full featured motherboards here very soon. We already have three 790FX motherboards in hand from ASUS, Gigabyte, and MSI.
Above we see where the 700 series sits in the line of upcoming chipsets from AMD that will have DX10.1 integrated GPUs to be used in mobile and low cost desktop products.
A breakdown of what the 700 series is comprised of is offered above. As noted, the 790FX shown here is the chipset at the top of the heap. Our 790FX flow chart shows our Quad CrossFire PCIe Gen 2 bus is split into four x8 at each card itself. We have yet to see where this bottleneck has shown to be an actual bottleneck in real world gaming performance. Considering we have seen ATI scale back in the number of lanes utilized atop their RV680 card that has two GPUs, it would seem that there is more than enough bandwidth at this moment.
One thing that is heavily glossed over in the slides is the fact that the SB600 southbridge is still with us. The SB600 does not have a big fan club, and as you will see in our upcoming motherboard reviews there are still some issues with it that need to be addressed. Why we are not seeing a better implemented and more efficient SB700 now is a bit perplexing to me. All that said, the SB600 is not a deal breaker unless it has some specific issue that would make it an Achilles heel for you. In all our performance testing the SB600 has not been of issue, but has been shown to be less than stellar in some IO tests compared with chipsets from today market like Intel’s ICH9R.
Our performance slide above shows an important aspect of HyperTransport 3.0 and PCIe Gen 2, but I have to very much question the increases shown in the Call of Juarez benchmark percentages noted. I think we can all agree HyperTransport 3 and PCIe Gen 2 are good things, but are much more welcome in the server market right now rather than a gamer’s desktop. Our experiences don’t show any current games that can scale CPU and GPU usage efficiently across multiple GPU streams and CPU cores.
The last two slides are very much worth looking at. In the day and age of $300 and $400 premium motherboards, AMD seems focused on even keeping enthusiast motherboards priced low. (Maybe that is where that aging SB600 gets spec’d in?
10 partners are noted for AMD’s 790FX chipset. Of those we already have three in our hands and I would suggest we would see at least 5 motherboard models in stock in North America by Q108.