"held back by a dated south bridge and dodgy motherboard implementations."

Just to know why is outdated?

Tell me what great new things the very “new” Nvidia and Intel SB have?

(If you are going to name RAID5, I would like to know the "smart" guy that uses more than 3 drives in his system and that also uses RAID5 with the drives.)

And the motherboards tell me what motherboard around the ALL existing in the market is as cheap and as good and with so many features like the MSI or Gigabyte 790FX based?

The only disappoint for me is the low clock the Phenoms got, otherwise:
- Ati 3850/3870 Perfect cards!
- Ati 790FX/X/770 based motherboards, Perfect!
- AMD Phenom X4 if they cost 50$ less than the Intel Q6600, good!

From enthusiast to parody. That is what I see with Spider. Quad graphics cards. Really? When I saw this, I thought we have finally reached the "Spinal Tap" edition of motherboards. An homage to silly excess.

What tiny minority of lunatic fringe enthusiasts will buy into this? As the world heads toward energy efficiency you will be powering a quad graphics card noise box with kilowatt power supplies for a few more FPS. Not to mention the ridiculous expense.

At what stage of life does someone waste this much on something so out there? As I student I never could afford to waste money on something so pointless. As a working adult it just seems silly even though I could easily afford it. I work in high tech land of the geeks, yet if someone at work bought into this 4 graphics card stuff, I would ask if they had taken leave of their senses.

Justification for this kind of spend is getting harder and harder. This seems less about filling any real performance need than merely bragging about having 4 graphics cards. Though who you would brag to, I can't imagine.

The real platform that AMD has a chance with is building a very good performing integrated platform, integrating CPU with graphics as powerful as R670 without a graphics card. That is the future. This 4 graphics card stuff, is a laugher and little more.

Here is the perfect case to go with the quad cards:
http://www.uberreview.com/2007/11/66-fan-casemod-looks-ugly-dangero...

Good write up - though probably not a true "hardcore" enthusiast (I have a real job and other responsibilities) in that I do not always have the latest stuff, I still build all my systems and keep them trimmed of junkware and updated. And you're right, I also go for the best deals in a specific price/performance range, so if a platform had all the main components (motherboard, CPU, GPU, RAM) that were the best performers and had a combined price of less then the individual parts (with the same or similar specs) otherwise chosen for a given upgrade, I would go with the platform. But in the short history of PC's that has never yet been the case. Though maybe this will be a first?

AMD actually finally has a platform and your already griefing it.. If the community actually wishes to keep benifiting from having a choice at dirt cheap prices then perhaps they should quit being so hard on a company thats not quite as perfect as intel. Cut em some slack already sheesh.. Spider platform is bitchin,as is slower and all who cares it's more then anyone needs anyway.

How 'bout this?

All Phenom chips could automatically unlock their multipliers when used with a 790FX mobo. If for some reason you don't want to get a 790FX, then you need to buy a Black Edition CPU.

Or a Core 2 Quad. :p

I think they need to focus all of their attention on the mid-range and low end.

Right now their CPU and Graphics are in 2nd place and their chipsets are in third.

Crossfire X has some good possibilities.
1) The ability to turn cards off when not in use (dynamically change the power used by the slot). Lower idle consumption for crossfire rigs.
2) Onboard graphics giving a boost to the low end cards.
3) Plug the monitor into the on board graphics and have the system use the discrete card during games and turn it off when doing normal PC things.

What about the Quad FX ? whend they gone launch it?
I think that 790FX combine whit the Phenom FX and a radeon X2 will probabilly be very competitive. 2*4cores is something and 4 radeon *2GPU will burn some power :))

now that i have been building enthusiast computers for some time now this is what i look for when getting new parts...

1. price per dollar, but also include caps on prices because computer prices fall so fast, and there is going to be a better cheaper part in a year. so i have refined my price limits to be.
CPU less than $200
Video card around $300
HDD around $100
Ram around $100
mobo lass than $150

i have previously bought all these parts for higher prices and regret it.
i bought the AMD 600 mhz for $250. i bought two 7900 gts for 300 each, i bought 1 gig dual channel of ddr ram for $180. I also boughta 2900xt for 300 bucks a couple months back, and now i'm really regretting that, not only is it not so great, it is way way to noise. so stupid, learn from my mistakes, anything over these prices are unnecessary over a short term, especially since you probably upgrade once a year.

note: i would probably not ever do a multi video card again, buy the time one spends all that money on 2 video cards, in one year next gen cards are better, cheaper, with less bugs, heat and noise. typically

As for the phenom and the 2900xt, i think they rushed it out the door with know problems, but they had to in order to make some cash flow. i bet that the 3870 was the planned release of this generation, but just couldn't do it in a timely fashion, and the phenom they just needed to release to keep investors happy with progress. but i have a feeling that with in six months AMD will look good to the enthusiast again, with the fixed phenom, mobo and maybe a new video card.

i am very excited about the next 6 months, and look forward to getting a sub $200 dual core penryl, or a quad core phenom B3.

my dream mobo
micro atx mobo 1 PCI-Express x16, good sound card on board, 1 gig nic, 4 to 6 usb ports, no firewire, no legacy crap, no onboard video, 2 ram slots, and a good chipset that doesn't have extra crap i dont need. and i think that would make it smaller and require less power/heat/more efficient. i dont even want raid. no ide connectors. all sata. looking at this, it is basically a upgradeable gaming console. fine with me, make it cheap and they will come

Should the next article in the series should be: The problem with enthusiast websites?

Beautiful pic. Gawd, I love spiders...

I haven't upgraded in almost 2 years, and that's atypical of me over the last decade or so. But there just hasn't been any need to. I just haven't encountered any "must-have" game that I feel the need to drop hundreds of dollars into my system for the sake of playing.

Nice pic on the front page ;)

Here's a thought.: Centrino notwithstanding, Intel has been selling enthusiast cpus and chipsets for a long time now, and done quite well in the enthusiast market, especially of late. That's two of the three categories referred to in this opinion piece. Nvidia has been doing two of the three categories as well for quite a while (chipset and gpu). I'm not sure you can call what Intel and Nvidia have been doing "platforms", but I suppose you could. So really, all AMD is doing is adding the 3rd piece, the gpu. That doesn't seem like that big of a stretch. I'm not saying they're doing it successfully, but it's not all that much beyond what Intel and Nvidia have been doing. In short, I'm not sure of the point of the article.

I'm pretty depressed myself at the current state of AMD's CPU/Mobo offerings. I hope things get resolved in the next month before I decide to blow some money on a Q6600, P35 pro, AMD 3870 crossfire combo.

Once this Phenom issue gets resolved though and the cores can be clocked at differing speeds, well I had a thought.

What if, for us gamer types, we could take a quad core Phenom and ramp up only two cores? Most games use two cores, so we get the speed we need for games without melting the CPU. In this scenario we might get two cores to 3.2GHZ, just to use a number, when the 4 cores maxxed together might top out at 2.9GHZ due to heat (again, just a number)

Then, if we need the 4 cores running for other apps, we can tweak the cores to respond to that need.

Step into my parlour, said the Spider to the enthusiast...

Yea, why not a discount. Like for AMD's Spider platform, they could give a $100 rebate when you buy one of each part.

I would be all over the Spider platform if they offered a 3Ghz Phenom 9XXX series...what are they going to call the 2.7, 2.8, 2.9 and 3.0 Ghz Phenoms anyway?

These are my thoughts exactly.
Catering to this market is good for small companies like Voodoo, or Alien, but AMD needs real pervasive platforms. Not one that targets a small and frickle niche market.

While AMD is wasting time here, Intel is defining ATCA for the Telecom industry. A $50B forecast over the next 5 years. I wonder what the forecast is for enthusiast platforms? $2, 5, $10M/annual? Does anyone even know?

Great stuff, Geoff.

I suppose AMD would argue that Crossfire X is their unique selling point, though I think I heard somewhere that this will come across to Intel chipsets in time. Even if it does remain unique to Spider, you can't get away from the reality that very few people (even amongst enthusiasts) see the need for two graphics cards (and almost all of those are SLI rather than Crossfire), so who's going to decide that three or four is a good idea?

I've actually found the flaky debut of 790FX much more depressing than the anti-climax of Phenom. I don't think anyone was really expecting Phenom to surpass Core 2, and I think the tone of Damage's review was spot on: it's certainly no winner yet, but it's probably good enough to keep AMD in the game if they can get on top of yields and fix the bugs.

But it seems almost unbelievable that they've brought a chipset to market that generally underperforms relative to the 2-year-old Nvidia competition (and probably relative to its predecessor as well), while featuring on what so far seem to be a flawed series of motherboards. I suppose they just ran out of time, but I certainly wouldn't contemplate buying into this platform as things stand, almost regardless of financial incentive. And that's actually the final kicker: both Phenom and the motherboards seem to be rather optimistically priced relative to the competition.

I may well go with a Radeon 3870 for the new build I'm planning for the New Year, but it looks like my CPU and chipset money is going to Intel.

Excellent write up there... Mirror most of the tech folks thinking..

Amen . . . . . . . . .

Is this like "An Open Letter To AMD"?

You speak the truth man. Keep it up.