AMD Phenom II X4 940

[Tiger the Cat]

I am thinking of upgrading to the above processor for HD video editing and AVCHD encoding together with a better Video Card and other stuff.

Anybody had experience of this CPU good or bad ?

[TurtleInAsia]

Personally if I would not touch AMD for anything that requires hard core processing power.

 

I just updated my machine to the i7 Extreme with a Gigabyte MB and some EVGA cards with SLI, my photoshop CS4 now starts in less that 1 second and encoding videos with DivXPro is a breeze.

[Tiger the Cat]

Hi Turtle,may I ask if you purchased in Thailand and,if so,where?

I looked at the Intel i7 also but the price is rather high although I'm sure its a lot more powerful.

I have been checking out Jedicool www.jedicool.com based in panthip Plaza for an idea of prices and availability of parts.

[Tiger the Cat]

The AMD Phenom II X4 955 is now available in Bangkok www.jedicool.com

Its an unlocked edition so can be OC'd to nearly 4Ghz,maybe more with water cooling.

I have decided to go for it together with DDR3 RAM and Asus M4A79T mb,300Gb Velociraptor and HIS HD 4850.

For me,the Intel i7 Extreme is just too expensive

[hungryandy]

I am thinking of upgrading to the above processor for HD video editing and AVCHD encoding together with a better Video Card and other stuff.

Anybody had experience of this CPU good or bad ?

 

Go here

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/desktop...chmarks,31.html

It is Toms Hardware CPU charts - the last update seems to be Q3 - 08 but that sOK as the latest processors including this one seem to be on there.

The chart allows you to select a particular bench mark(s) to suit your application.

A top end Intel dual core can beet teh pants of a quad core in some applications as there coe claock rate is higher. If the application doesnt EFFECTIVLEY make use of multi core then you can save a lot of money and put that to extra RAM.

Dont forget you will need 64 bit windows to use over 3.5gig of RAM. But RAM can make a huge difference to teh usability and application speed.

 

If you have a look around ther eare also bench marks for video cards on the site. You may also want to check out ANANDTECH.com for the latest on video cards.

[azulblue]

I was just looking at this CPU yesterday, with a friendly computer guru, and our conclusion was that with a decent motherboard it was good value for the money. Especially for an upgrade where you already have most of the peripherals already and may only need to upgrade or increase your ram.

 

Adding an 80-128gb SSD HD, instead of a raid0 array, will dramatically speed things up.

Edited August 30, 2009 by azulblue

[xerive]

Seriously now, the IE7 chip really is more powerful in every aspect of modern computing then any AMD chip at the moment.

[hungryandy]

Seriously now, the IE7 chip really is more powerful in every aspect of modern computing then any AMD chip at the moment.

 

 

While the I7 and I5 may be top end technology, its not necessarily the fastest in all applications, AND if we consider the budget available for the project certain applications may get the job done faster with a lower cost 2 core processor with more memory (assuming a 64 bit OS)

 

Anand Tech has some interesting articles that discuss the speed penalties you pay for running programs not optimized for 4 core 4 thread environments. The penalties in machine over head for reasigining processors and or threads are surprisingly high and this will happen regularly on a non optimized code string.

 

Photoshop CS$ for example flys on a 2 core processor, and can be spead up by enabling the video card to be used as a processor. The use of the GPU for some calculations is becoming more important in todays world of high capability Graphics.

 

Photo shop will benefit HUGELY from more RAM. 8 Gig under 64bit OS.

Also putting the cache on a different hard drive will speed PS and the 2nd cache on a 3 hard drive works even better. Note were talking DRIVE not PARTITION.

 

SO the saving on processor cost can defray teh cost of Memory and drives.

 

There arearticles on Anand that have benchmarks for different processors, with different applications.

If you look at those Bench Marks it is clear that some applications run much better on an I7 while some of the apps like CS4 Like more memory on a lower cost higer speed 2 core processor.