- Tuesday, 1 December 2009
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He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire - Winston Churchill
INQ holds off on Phenom review
AMD DECIDED TO launch its Phenom processors in quite an unusual way, following a precedent set by Intel around year and a half ago for its Conroe launch.
AMD pitched the idea of the events with 150 hacks (per event), testing 40-50 available systems with MSI and GigaByte motherboards, and everybody goes home happy. Did it really happen? Well... not exactly.
In two days, we had a grand total of six hours with no less than four systems. Originally, we might have been happy with results from just one system, but why there is no review of Phenom processors on INQ today, or in days before?
First and foremost, INQ will run a review of Phenom processors when they arrive in our own controlled environment, where it will be possible to compare it with the competition and the previous generation. We'd like to compare it when running on AM2 motherboards, The Nforce 590 and Radeon Xpress 580 (580X) chipsets, to check for compatibility.
Secondly, we are going to work with benchmark development companies in getting patches for benchmarks that have problems detecting a Phenom. Currently, it does not matter if are you running one stick of memory or two, you will get almost identical scores - sometimes even lower than the 5000+ Black Edition on our 790FX motherboard.
We also have a problem with the hardware configuration of the machines we played with. They all had the BIOS in its first revision while our GA-MA790FX-DQ6 has the latest BIOS. Also, reviewing a system that has a Radeon HD3850 with only 256MB of video memory is daft in our view.
We intend to test a 3850 graphics card in combination with Phenom, but we'll stick an Nvidia GeForce 8800GTX by Zotac too - the highest-clocked 8800GTX out there. We want to see the compatibility with memory sticks from Corsair, OCZ, A-DATA, graphics cards such as 11 Radeon and GeForce based boards, see are there any stability issues and so on.
We talked with AMD and they are going to deliver us CPUs which are representative of ones you are able to buy in stores today, not AMD 2.4GHz engineering samplea " ones.
If all things go well, review should be out quite soon. ยต
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I have been baffled by the reviews I read today at other sites that don't "do the platform". They all test the 790fx/Phenom with Nvidia video cards. I wanted to see the platform as a whole to see if it made a difference.
" following a precedent set by Intel around year and a half ago for its Conroe launch."

Intel previewed a work in progress 4-5 months before launch in March 2006 -- lighting up the internet with calls of 'we must wait to get test systems in our labs' and 'take with a grain of salt.'

Come launch on July 14, 2006 the internet was opened up to a flood of independent third party reviews. Of which I will link a few:
http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/cpu/intel-core2-duo-e6600.html
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/intel_core_2_performance/
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=6184

You continue to cast AMD's poor behavior in light of 'what Intel has done' when in true context it could not be further from the truth.

Anand has this to say on AMD's methodologies:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3153

"A representative from AMD's PR agency in charge of the Tahoe trip asked me, somewhat surprised, "what, Intel doesn't work like this?". 

Sorry to say, Intel doesn't. 
"

What a load of Inq crap once again.