Ohai,
Is there really much difference between the two chip types?
And why such a huge price difference? (Suspect the first question will answer this aswell XD)
And would you guys really recommend a Phenom II X4 over a Athlon II X4 for general school work, internet browsing and odd bit of gaming as a cheap decent rig? Cheaper Athlon II X4 would allow me to buy a better gfx card which brings back the old argument of CPU Vs. GPU xD
(Bearing in mind I will upgrade at a later time)
Thanks
Alistair

The main design difference is that the Athlon II doesn't have any L3 cache and the Phenom II is available with faster clock speeds.

Here is a set of benchmarks comparing the two chip types.

Thanks for the benchmarks was quite useful
Huge CPU nub atm - don't get what the caches are - know that its kinda the more the better and the higher mb the better but thats it xD

The level 3 cache makes a huge difference. Essentially, the Athlons do ok in heavily threaded apps and are a lot of cores for little more. Aside from that, not worth it in the slightest.

However, I wouldn't recommend anything X4 from AMD at the moment as the pricing is nonsense compared with vastly better Intel equivalents.

If you insist on AMD, go either 770 chipset (MSI board is the only recommended one) or go 785/790GX and stick a Phenom X2 550BE. That'll cope with everything you want for now. If you buy an Asus board based on the latter chipsets, you have the option of potentially unlocking additional cores (which could be fun ) You could then upgrade to X4 if you need to in the future.

Aside from all of that Intel are launching their new value end parts at CES this week and will no doubt shake up the entire market for sub £150 CPUs.

One reason Im going AMD is that everything is so much cheaper xD
I mean a 17yr old student is pretty much screwed - I can get 4GB DDR3 a dual core AMD (@ 3.2) and a MSI C770 C45 for £250 - then another £100ish for a gpu and its a set-up thats decent and will last for a while.

Asked about athlon because there X4s @ 2.8ghz are going for £90 so wondered if it would be much of a boost over a Phenom II X2 that I was thinking of buying :S

Know very little about Asus' AM3 boards - will probs look them up (not sure what you mean about unlocking extra cores xD)

Regards
Alistair

He might be talking about the triple-core chips IIRC - some are actually quads, but because the majority of the batch was found to be triple the fourth core is disabled and it's sold as triple. It's something like that, and that's all IIRC.

Oh THAT'S what he meant xD Knew about that - but no reference was made to the X3s xD

Some X2s can be unlocked too. To become either triple or quad core. Only Asus allow you to pick triple core if your chip won't run stably as a quad. X3 is hard to find now (unless you like buying from shoddy companies like Overclockers )

You clearly haven't heard about the pricing for the new i3 chips. The i3-530 is supposed to be around £80-90 and gives Athlon X4 beating performance. Also, you need the same 4gigs you were gonna buy and you can stick it in a P55 motherboard, so you have the option of upgrading to i5 or i7 at a later date. Unless AMD drop prices in the next week, there will be no advantage to buying one that I can see.

I would've gone X2 550BE, Asus 785G board and 4gig, until this week. But the i3-530 with an £80 board (Gigabyte P55-UD2) is all of about £20 more expensive (if that) and more overclockable, more future-proof and far better as far as power consumption, heat and efficiency.

The major price advantage with buying AMD extends beyond the CPU to the mobo as well.

Except that a board with a decent chipset for core unlocking and better voltage regulation than the 770 is £70 anyway. As I said above, only £10 cheaper than P55. As the CPU is only £10 cheaper, that's £20ish total.

Its worth looking into - and no I hadnt heard about i3's xD Sure they're not just renamed the c2q's and changed the socket?
The potential of a X2 becoming X3/4 or X3 becoming X4 is very tempting though - again will have to look into that; what asus boards run it though? The M4A series?
Regards

The new i3 is based on the same architecture as it's bigger bros the i5 and i7. It massively outperforms a C2D and appears to overclock very well, even at this early stage. It's also a 32nm chip with integrated GPU on die (although that's 45nm). Technologically, very, very interesting and a taste of what is to come in the next 12-18mths.

As for boards, it's all of these:


However, if going AMD (which I was considering recently) but staying on a budget, I would go with this one:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Asus-M4A785TD-V-EVO-AMD-785G-AM3-PCI-E-20(x16)-DDR3-1800(OC)-1600(OC)-SATA-II-SATA-RAID-VGA

Well reviewed and has mostly everything you could want, but is still sub-£70.

i3/i5 tests, worth reading:

http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac ... ?artc_pg=1

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/rev ... 1-part-cpu

Basically, your PC's RAM runs much more slowly than its CPU, therefore the CPU will often sit there waiting for data to come from RAM. What the CPU cache does is keep some of the data that the CPU has recently used, as it runs at the same speed as the CPU is is accessed much more quickly and reduces the time that the CPU is waiting.

How much the CPU's cache speeds things up is entirely application specific, some developers will even aim to write code that's small enough to sit in the cache and therefore not fetched from RAM.

Ah cheers, makes sense now