AMD Looks to Burn Intel With Competitively Priced Dragon Platform

From DailyTech: On Thursday, AMD released its new Phenom II processors. As DailyTech predicted the day before, the new processors came in a Phenom II X4 920 and an X4 940 quad core variant. The X4 940, dubbed the "Black Edition", is clocked at 3.0 GHz, while X4 920 is clocked at 2.8 GHz. Both processors have proved solid overclockers in early testing, falling just short of the Penryn and Nehalem (i7) Intel processors in terms of overclock, based on early testing.

The processors greatest advantage is price. The X4 920 retails at $235, while the X4 940 Black Edition retails at $275. A motherboard for the platform costs around $120 and memory comes at around $75. Together this is much cheaper than Intel's i7 platform, which has a processor cost of $295 for the i7 920 2.66 GHz model and a cost of $565 at Newegg for the i7 940 2.93 GHz model. It also does not require more expensive DDR3, which the i7 platform does. So while the i7 trumps the Phenom II significantly in performance, this is largely offset by a higher price.

Price wise, the Phenom II X4 940 is most comparable with Intel's Penryn quad-core, the Q9400 (2.66 GHz), while the 920 is similarly priced to the Q9300/Q8200. The Phenom IIs in initial testing appear to be the better pick at these price points.

Together with its already released 48xx series of ATI Radeon graphics cards and its 790 series chipsets, first released in November 2007, the new processor forms AMD's hot new Dragon platform.

The platform offers AMD's Fusion for Gaming technology, which suspends background tasks to channel extra resources into gaming. It also features AMD OverDrive, which allows an overclock to be more easily applied with a single button press, during system operation.

View: Article @ Source Site