# Processor opinion: Athlon II or Phenom II



## roddierod (Jan 5, 2011)

My current machine seem to be on it's last legs, it has two Opteron dual core processors.
I'm looking to replace it with either an Athlon II X4 or Phenom II X4. My main OS will be FreeBSD and I'll have a second drive with Windows 7 just to play PES 2011 and Elder Scroll series games. Given that does any one have an experience or opinion on the performance of these two processors. All the machines I have configured are about 200 cheaper if I go with the Athlon.


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## vermaden (Jan 5, 2011)

Athlon II is the same as Phenom II but with L3 cache disabled, I would get Athlon II X4 XXXe series, its possible to get quad core with TDP 45W with Athlon II.

For example: *Athlon II X4 615e* (4 x 2.5GHz) has TDP of 45W and it should cost about $150 (at least it costs that in my country - Poland).

Check that list for more details, it also includes Athlon II CPUs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Phenom_microprocessors

Also check if Your motherboard will support that new CPU.


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## roddierod (Jan 5, 2011)

Thanks Vermaden, I knew you'd be able to point me in the right direction.


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## vermaden (Jan 5, 2011)

Welcome mate.


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## rusty (Jan 5, 2011)

If you want to compare _x vs y_ chip, have a look at http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/188?vs=30 (just replaced an 5600+ with the X4 645 which is why the link is set to those).


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## graudeejs (Jan 5, 2011)

I bought *AMD Athlon(tm) II X4 600e Processor (2209.79-MHz K8-class CPU)* about year go.
I totally Love it, 45W is awesome, PC would run almost without noise If I wouldn't add extra fan.

I have fan-less ATI video card (VERY hot), that's why I keep extra fan,
Other than that I bought even low port consumption HDD's (still fast enough), so I could run my box without FAN, but I rather make 2x sure it works.
I created custom fan regulator to reduce noise, when I don't need it to run on 100%

Right now I use it for virtualization (VirtualBox with windows), works flawlessly
I can compile OOo in 8 hours (if I remember correctly) without ccache

Phenom II had much more Wats  when I was thing which CPU to buy.
Best of all you, if you ever want to, you can possibly upgrade to Phenom when you want, if you have cash 

I like AMD for the fact that you don't need to buy whole new motherboard (end everything else, that depends on it), just to change CPU (in most cases)

I'd like to suggest, you to pay attention to socket. (I'd buy motherboard and CPU with whatever latest socket is possible [When you buy CPU and Motherboard])


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## Carpetsmoker (Jan 6, 2011)

I have a Phenom II X4 925. Had it for almost a year and works great.
Last week my mom's computer got stolen () and I got her a Phenom II X4 945. Total costs were about 325 euro (Excluding hard drives and DVD drive, I had those lying around).

Is the Intel i7 faster? Yes. Is it more expensive? It sure is.

AMD has a very good price/quality ratio.

As a sidenote, you may want to wait a bit before buying a new CPU. Intel's new Sandy bridge are on the doorstep (next week) and AMD fusion CPU's are expected "Q1 2011" (hopefully we'll get more on that during CES).

Current Intel sockets (LGA1366 and LGA1156) will be phased out very soon. (In fact, the successor for the LGA1366 is the LGA1356, which has it's own successor the LGA2011 planned as soon as Q3 2011!?!)

I know there's always the next big thing on the doorstep, but this is very close and both new architectures promise great (above average) improvements ...



> I have fan-less ATI video card (VERY hot), that's why I keep extra fan,



Bit OT, but which one do you have? I've got a Club3D HD5750 Noiseless, which was the best fanless graphics card at the time (In fact, I believe it still is).
I expected it to be really hot, and I got two 80mm case fans, but to my surprise I can't get it hotter than about 65 degrees! Even if I stress three cores and the GPU 100%.


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## graudeejs (Jan 6, 2011)

Well I think 65 is pretty hot


```
ATI Technologies Inc RV710 [Radeon HD 4350]
```
I bought cheapest Radeon available.... I wasn't going to use it for desktop (until few weeks ago)


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## vermaden (Jan 6, 2011)

Carpetsmoker said:
			
		

> As a sidenote, you may want to wait a bit before buying a new CPU. Intel's new Sandy bridge are on the doorstep (next week) and AMD fusion CPU's are expected "Q1 2011" (hopefully we'll get more on that during CES).
> 
> (...)
> 
> I know there's always the next big thing on the doorstep, but this is very close and both new architectures promise great (above average) improvements ...



... or wait for them to massively appear and then buy older hardware for less money


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## rusty (Jan 6, 2011)

SandyBridge does look pretty impressive.There's a very in-depth review of Intel's new CPU for anyone that's interested http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sandy-bridge-core-i7-2600k-core-i5-2500k,2833.html

Waiting to see AMD's Bulldozer materialize.


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## roddierod (Jan 6, 2011)

We use Xeon and other Intel dual/Quad core offerings at work and although rated faster and more expensive I am quite un-impressed with them. Granted I only use them at work with Windows XP Pro and Windows server 2000 - 2008, but my 6 year old dual-core, multiprocessor Opteron preforms better than this less than a year old Quad core Intel under my desk.


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## phoenix (Jan 6, 2011)

vermaden said:
			
		

> ... or wait for them to massively appear and then buy older hardware for less money



The beautiful thing about AMD is that you can usually stick with a single motherboard and socket (and RAM!!) for a couple generations of CPU.  AMD also *only* differentiates on number of cores, speed of cores, and amount of cache.  All other CPU features are the same.

Intel likes to change their socket, and their RAM, with every refresh of the CPU.    And they have a features matrix a mile long and a mile wide with every permutation/combination of CPU feature.  It's like reading an encyclopedia trying to find a CPU that has *all* the features you want.

This makes it nice to buy a higher-end AMD motherboard with a mid/low-end CPU, and upgrade the CPU 2 or 3 times down the road as needed.


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## vermaden (Jan 7, 2011)

phoenix said:
			
		

> The beautiful thing about AMD is (...)



Yeah.

AMD tries to play 'true' only changing sockets when its really needed (VIA also), while Intel changes sockets whenever 'he' thinks that he can get additional money for it.

AMD is also great price/performance ratio winner, for example, 8-core CPU with needed motherboard costs only about $500 ... for new parts:

AMD Opteron 6128 8 x 2.0GHz | L3 Cache: 12MB | 115W
SUPERMICRO MBD-H8SGL-O | Max. Memory: 128GB

... or make it 2 x 8 core with dual socket motherboard, for just $150 more ...
TYAN S8230GM4NR-DL Dual Socket


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## Carpetsmoker (Jan 7, 2011)

Yeah, that's a problem.

I'm currently updating our pricelist, website, etc. to the new Sandy Bridge architecture.
For example, we have a i5-2400 and a i5-2500k.
As you might expect, these are mostly the same CPU's except that the 2500k is clocked higher.
BUT ... The 2400 doesn't have VT extensions, the 2500k does.

It's the same core, so there's no technical reason not to have VT on the 2500k ... It's just intel trying to segment the market and get more money for the same piece of hardware.



I can also remember that I sold a E7200 (...IIRC) to a customer that should have VT according to ark.intel.com ... But I sold the wrong stepping apparently and that one DIDN'T have intel VT ......

It's complicating and confusing for me ... Imagine how it must be like for a not-too-tech-savvy customer!


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## vermaden (Jan 7, 2011)

@Carpetsmoker

Same 'problem' here mate, I must have dig all needed data to find out, that there are two stepping of Intel Q8300 quad core, one that supports VT-x (I got that one), and the one that does not ...

That is Intel 'way', if You buy cheaper CPU, then it has VT-x (or other hardware extensions, or turbo mode, or HTT, or ...) disabled, but hey they are enabled in higher 'models' just pay more ... pricks.


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## ahavatar (Jan 11, 2011)

Carpetsmoker said:
			
		

> It's the same core, so there's no technical reason not to have VT on the 2500k ... It's just intel trying to segment the market and get more money for the same piece of hardware.



All i5 and i7 Sandy Bridge CPU's have VT-x, but only 2400, 2500 and 2600 have VT-d (IOMMU) support. They disabled VT in the cheaper i3 series CPU's, but I have no idea about more expensive K models not having VT-d. Since K models have unlocked multiplier, maybe VT-d not functioning if overclocked ?


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## Carpetsmoker (Jan 11, 2011)

Right ... I see what you mean.
It's confusing, for someone who just wants to have a general idea of what is going on without going into all the details of which CPU has what it's hard to keep track ...



> I have no idea about more expensive K models not having VT-d. Since K models have unlocked multiplier, maybe VT-d not functioning if overclocked ?



That's what ark.intel.com tells me.

http://ark.intel.com/Compare.aspx?ids=52210,52209,
http://ark.intel.com/Compare.aspx?ids=52214,52213,


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## oed (Jan 13, 2011)

Here's another vote for AMD. I might upgrade my home server this year. The Xeon are the only intel CPUs I'd fancy, and please correct me if i'm wrong, the only ones that supports ECC memory. On the AMD side of the fence, there's ECC and virtualization support on every model. Including the cheap consumer level CPUs.


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## troberts (Jan 19, 2011)

vermaden said:
			
		

> @Carpetsmoker
> 
> Same 'problem' here mate, I must have dig all needed data to find out, that there are two stepping of Intel Q8300 quad core, one that supports VT-x (I got that one), and the one that does not ...
> 
> That is Intel 'way', if You buy cheaper CPU, then it has VT-x (or other hardware extensions, or turbo mode, or HTT, or ...) disabled, but hey they are enabled in higher 'models' just pay more ... pricks.


Remember when there were only two versions of a cpu? 'SX' models did not have a working math coprocessor, while the 'DX' models did.


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## vermaden (Jan 19, 2011)

_"Remember when computing was fun?"_


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## MellowCat (Mar 14, 2011)

ahavatar said:
			
		

> All i5 and i7 Sandy Bridge CPU's have VT-x, but only 2400, 2500 and 2600 have VT-d (IOMMU) support. They disabled VT in the cheaper i3 series CPU's, but I have no idea about more expensive K models not having VT-d. Since K models have unlocked multiplier, maybe VT-d not functioning if overclocked ?



I'm looking at picking up some of these things (sandy bridge) at the moment, and my work colleagues have indicated that even though these CPU's have virtualization technology directed I/O (VT-d) enabled, one wouldn't be able to use it for hardware-enabled VM's (KVM or Xen) unless the motherboard (and BIOS) supported VT-d as well.

My question is, how do you  discover whether a certain motherboard does or does not support VT-d?
The information is very difficult to find, not really published by the motherboard makers.

Any direction here? (I realize VirtualBox would run fine without VT-d, and that FreeBSD may not support hardware (IOMMU) VT VMs at the moment).

Thanks for any info
/K


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## carlton_draught (Mar 14, 2011)

Carpetsmoker said:
			
		

> As a sidenote, you may want to wait a bit before buying a new CPU. Intel's new Sandy bridge are on the doorstep (next week) and AMD fusion CPU's are expected "Q1 2011" (hopefully we'll get more on that during CES).
> 
> Current Intel sockets (LGA1366 and LGA1156) will be phased out very soon. (In fact, the successor for the LGA1366 is the LGA1356, which has it's own successor the LGA2011 planned as soon as Q3 2011!?!)
> 
> I know there's always the next big thing on the doorstep, but this is very close and both new architectures promise great (above average) improvements ...


I've been salivating over the new processors coming out too. Mainly because I'm hunting low cost, low IDLE power + ECC RAM. Unfortunately the bobcat doesn't have it, which is very unfortunate, otherwise potentially perfect for a NAS build. Llano (coming out in July) looks to have the potential to offer that. On a home NAS, the processor TDP is only good for knowing the upper bound of the idle power. And seeing that 95% of the time that NAS will be idling, even when serving up media, idle power and not performance per watt will determine your power bills.

I figure that with power gating on cores, and hopefully, on the GPU (which is now in the so-called APU and not on the motherboard any more), it should be possible to have an ultra-low power draw without undervolting.* Which is important in a NAS build, because if the NAS has lots of SATA ports, USB3 (for backups via HDD dock) and ECC RAM, it should be feature complete going into the next 5+ years. Spinning media aren't going to be rate limited by the SATA interface, so the only upgrades one will do is to put new HDDs in the NAS (and demote the old ones to the backup pool).

*I've had really bad luck with undervolting btw. I tested it in the undervolted configuration for a day or so, no crash or detectable errors. But it would hang every so often once in use, and I didn't know what the cause was. Set it back to default, and guess what? No random hanging any more!


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## carlton_draught (Mar 14, 2011)

oed said:
			
		

> Here's another vote for AMD. I might upgrade my home server this year. The Xeon are the only intel CPUs I'd fancy, and please correct me if i'm wrong, the only ones that supports ECC memory. On the AMD side of the fence, there's ECC and virtualization support on every model. Including the cheap consumer level CPUs.


At least as far as ECC memory support goes, I know you are correct. Which is why Intel does not even get a look in for me, they have nothing in the low cost/low idle power in the Xeon range.


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## ahavatar (Mar 15, 2011)

MellowCat said:
			
		

> My question is, how do you  discover whether a certain motherboard does or does not support VT-d?
> The information is very difficult to find, not really published by the motherboard makers.
> 
> Any direction here? (I realize VirtualBox would run fine without VT-d, and that FreeBSD may not support hardware (IOMMU) VT VMs at the moment).
> ...



For Intel Sandy Bridge CPU's, no Pxx/Hxx (e.g. P67/H67/H61) series chipset motherboards support VT-d, only Q67 chipset motherboards support VT-d. http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1590654 

For other CPU's, http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/VTdHowTo


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