TR Forums

The Egg actually has a 790FX Motherboard for sale!!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813128070

$270! Man... I hope those prices drop before I get ready to build next month. Call me a sucker, but I'll probably stay with AMD...

Im waiting for a board with the SB700 southbridge....I'll be waiting a long time too

790FX is highend chipset that support multiple GPUs, I don't expect them to drop below $200. A cheaper variant of the chipset that supports only 1x16 or 1x16+1x4 or 2x8 may result in a cheaper board.

But hey, who stole the 2.6GHz Phenom? The Grinch again?

I really didn't think the SB600's were that bad, of course I'm still running 939 on an Nfarce 4 chipset.... BTW, where are the Vista Drivers Nvidia .... Sorry, I digress....

You really think the SB700's will be that big a difference? I'm pretty sure that most decent 690 mobo's have 3rd party chips to make up for it's shortcomings...

This is a little off topic, but have you seen all the cr*p on the web about AMD becoming the next Cyrix/VIA? Geez.... AMD will come back stronger than ever!

Wait until Nehalem when Intel tries to put it's memory controller on the CPU... I could be wrong, but I think they might stumble there.

Flying Fox wrote:

But hey, who stole the 2.6GHz Phenom? The Grinch again?

You are the fracking Grinch man.... Traitor!!!!

AMD/ATI together? I see alot of integration possibilities there, CPU/GPU on the same piece of glass?! Seems like natural progression to me, and I don't know if Big Blue is even considering that yet.....

Daveburt714 wrote:

AMD/ATI together? I see alot of integration possibilities there, CPU/GPU on the same piece of glass?! Seems like natural progression to me, and I don't know if Big Blue is even considering that yet.....

Bah... I don't give a damn about the integration at this point. Just want ATI to give me a PROPER high-end card and AMD to finally roll out Phenom.

AMD has been in worse spots than this... They do need to get thier shtuff together, but all this sillyness about AMD going belly up is just ridiculous!!

Have you seen this tool Morphine?
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/ ... lity-jewel

I'd love to get my hands on a Phenom with that software... Tweakers Dream come true!!

If you could tweak the cores individually and there was only one weak one, theoretically, you could set the multiplier to ~10x on that core and crank the good ones!!

I dunno, Phenom looks kinda interesting to me....
Guess I could be beating a dead horse though

What gets me is that after being out of the lead for just a little over a year all the Intel fanboys are predicting AMD is going to go out of business. Those pathetic Pentium 4's were sucking for 4 long years under the Athlon64 and X2's and nobody ever said Intel would die off. AMD just did a gigantic merger right before the release of new chipsets, GPU's and CPU's. Yet we see they are on track with pretty damn good hardware. Their rate of R&D has been amazing during this time and they're releasing refreshes of the R600 less than 6 months after it hits. Hell, they already have CPU's, GPU's and chipsets planned out for 2 to 3 years ahead. This is a feat because they basically had to get their "fusion" products designed since they merged with ATI!

My point is, AMD is a damn good company that is performing extraordinarily well under the circumstances. They're big players in several markets, mainly the CPU and GPU markets and they are rolling with the punches. I wish I had some money in the bank to buy their stock. A comp that can perform like this will see a damn good increase in their stock value in the long run.

Daveburt714 wrote:

AMD has been in worse spots than this... They do need to get thier shtuff together, but all this sillyness about AMD going belly up is just ridiculous!!

Worse? Not financially I am afraid. They have seen consecutive quarters of losses mounting to billions of dollars before, yes. However, not with this amount of debt. All it takes is one creditor to call in the debt and we will be seeing Chapter 11. They have been practically printing money with creative financial tricks like issuing covertible bonds, equivalent to you applying one credit card and run balances on that card to pay off another credit card debt. If they don't start to make any real money the bubble will burst somewhere. So while they are not going to go belly up tomorrow, the threat is very real. Let's not lose sight of that.

wingless wrote:

Those pathetic Pentium 4's were sucking for 4 long years under the Athlon64 and X2's and nobody ever said Intel would die off.

That's basically the difference between Intel and AMD. AMD is under a mountain of debt. Intel is sitting on fat cash reserves and with momentum to still rake in profits quarter after quarter. When they were sucking so much they are still in the black. AMD has always been treading a fine line between black and red. Intel can basically sit on their cash and just hang on for a while, and that's what they did over the Netbust years. What woke them up? Servers. AMD was finally making some inroads and in the process managed to wake up the beast.

wingless wrote:

My point is, AMD is a damn good company that is performing extraordinarily well under the circumstances.

That I agree, they manage to stay afloat (or at least create the illusion of "doing well").

wingless wrote:

I wish I had some money in the bank to buy their stock. A comp that can perform like this will see a damn good increase in their stock value in the long run.

How long? That's the problem. This is the stock market, and most people don't look past a few quarters.

If you will just step of that excited state and try to see past the pretty power points. A company with a ton of debt, and that debt is actually increasing with the continuing losses (if they lose money they have to get it from somewhere right?). No sign of turning a profit. If you are a banker would you lend more money? Be honest, just look at the numbers.

Narrowing losses is a good sign, but the bottomline is that they need to turn some positive cash flow soon. There can only be that much expenses to cut because most of them are interest payments. You think the creditors will be nice and forgive your interest and/or principal? I don't think so. So for DAAMIT's and our sakes they had better deliver at least on the RV670. Phenom I really don't care too much because they don't need to outright beat Intel to stay around. They now have the distribution channels.

But be serious, they are in trouble, and it will probably get worse before it can get better. /cliché

I won't argue with you on the financial front Fox... They are definetly teetering... But those guys (AMD) are the renigades of Silicon Valley, they think WAY outside the box compared to Intel! It would be a sad day for technology if AMD went down!!

I still wonder, what would have happened if Commodore hadn't gone under, and Amiga's were still around today...

Supposedly we only have a few weeks and we'll see AMD's Spider platform... It can't be that bad, as long as the price is right!

My old 939 is still plenty fast enough!!

Daveburt714 wrote:

My old 939 is still plenty fast enough!!

And there's the problem for AMD and Intel.

Somebody's been passing out roofies in this thread. There's a weird and irrational sort of AMD love going on here.

The only "outside the box" thinking I've seen AMD do lately is in the financial area

flip-mode wrote:

The only "outside the box" thinking I've seen AMD do lately is in the financial area

Outside the box and under the box.

flip-mode wrote:

The only "outside the box" thinking I've seen AMD do lately is in the financial area

I have to amend that to say that I personally find their Black Edition CPUs to be not only creative thinking in terms of a product offering but also very compelling. It won't beat an OC'd Conroe/Allendale, but it's unlocked multi offers a fun factor not available on the Intel side until one spend SEVERAL hundred dollars more.

Daveburt714 wrote:

I really didn't think the SB600's were that bad, of course I'm still running 939 on an Nfarce 4 chipset.... BTW, where are the Vista Drivers Nvidia .... Sorry, I digress....

Aren't vista drivers out for nforce 4?

But those guys (AMD) are the renigades of Silicon Valley, they think WAY outside the box compared to Intel!

Like with their Native Quad Core that gives 'em such a performance advantage? Or maybe it's their excellent product names that just excite the marketplace, like FASN8 or 4x4? Ooh, ooh, I know, whereas Intel is actually releasing good products, AMD is takin' 'em all by surprise and coming out a year too late?

That's WAY outside the box, all right.

Well SPOOFE, maybe your just too young to remember, or you have a seriously skewd view of what innovation is... Let's see:

1st chip to reach 1Ghz, 3DNOW!, 32 and 64 bit instructions on chip, on die Memory Controller, Hypertransport, Cool&Quiet, SOI medium, first native dual core, first native quad core, 1st to use DDR memory, let alone the fact that they are the only thing that has kept Intel honest on the price front for the last 20 years... I'm sure there are others, those are just off the top of my head!

Granted, they are obviously having problems with Phenom right now, but it's a new architecture and a relatively new process. They'll figure it out....

Guess they could have slapped 2 X2's on a single package like Intel did, ofcourse then they'd be corporate lemmings too....

mongoosesRawesome wrote:

Aren't vista drivers out for nforce 4?

Thanks for the Link Mongoose!

I usually make it a point to get my drivers from the motherboard manufacturer (In this case ASUS, A8N-E), their website still doesn't have those drivers available.... I'll do some checking to make sure the drivers are reliable for that board first though...

Daveburt714 wrote:

mongoosesRawesome wrote:

Aren't vista drivers out for nforce 4?

Thanks for the Link Mongoose!

I usually make it a point to get my drivers from the motherboard manufacturer (In this case ASUS, A8N-E), their website still doesn't have those drivers available.... I'll do some checking to make sure the drivers are reliable for that board first though...

Unfortunately the nForce3 users are still getting hung to dry, with no end in sight.

Daveburt714 wrote:

1st chip to reach 1Ghz, 3DNOW!, 32 and 64 bit instructions on chip, on die Memory Controller, Hypertransport, Cool&Quiet, SOI medium, first native dual core, first native quad core, 1st to use DDR memory, let alone the fact that they are the only thing that has kept Intel honest on the price front for the last 20 years... I'm sure there are others, those are just off the top of my head!

Most of the above are evolutionary. About the only thing out of the box is the foresight to plan for native dual-core in anticipation of problems of scaling single-threaded performance.

Guess they could have slapped 2 X2's on a single package like Intel did, ofcourse then they'd be corporate lemmings too....

That could be thinking out of the box; realizing building a monolithic 280+ mm^2 core may cause problems and have a backup plan just in case and sometimes elegance doesn't matter as much as time to market, performance and cost.

accord1999 wrote:

Guess they could have slapped 2 X2's on a single package like Intel did, ofcourse then they'd be corporate lemmings too....

That could be thinking out of the box; realizing building a monolithic 280+ mm^2 core may cause problems and have a backup plan just in case and sometimes elegance doesn't matter as much as time to market, performance and cost.

AMD did think of this but they decided that people would reject the idea of a hack job quad core CPU, obviously they were wrong.

Thankfully there is talk of the 8 core cpus on the 45nm node being 2 quads on the same die linked via HTT each with 1 64bit memory controller to the outside for each core.

Flying Fox wrote:

There can only be that much expenses to cut because most of them are interest payments. You think the creditors will be nice and forgive your interest and/or principal?

According to a blurb in Barron's, talks to sell the Dresden fab to TSMC are back on again, FWIW.

morphine wrote:

flip-mode wrote:

The only "outside the box" thinking I've seen AMD do lately is in the financial area

Outside the box and under the box.

Living in a box down at the end of an alley, next to a dumpster.

Archer wrote:

morphine wrote:

flip-mode wrote:

The only "outside the box" thinking I've seen AMD do lately is in the financial area

Outside the box and under the box.

Living in a box down at the end of an alley, next to a dumpster.

Shi, that ain't so bad. I've been living in a van down by the river!