I killed my 2.6C with too many volts... actually lots did, it even has an popular acroym called NSDS "northwood sudden death syndrome"...

Northys couldnt handle volts like bartons. Bartons you could/can literally ABUSE with 2.2Volts, even says so in AMD tech docs, and I've never heard of anyone frying a Barton/tbred. Not so with Northwood..1.65-1.7 is about the extreme limits before catastrophe.

I love techreport almost as much as X2's. You guys do an excellent job of showing all testing conditions and show lots of real world so anyone can reproduce with no question as to settings,:)

All I can say about this processor is OMG!!! I want one now, not June, not Q3 like Anand speculates, NOW!!!!

I wish you tried OCing.... My plan is H2O with my RBX buy 4400+ put them @ 2.8ish.

I agree with #126, Extreme overclcoking is silly unless you're into cyber benchmark olympics which is cool but not my thing. The amount of money spent offers extremely poor value for the 10-15% gains over good, cheap, "poor-mans water cooling" like a $40 Thermalright XP120.

Buying $1000 vapos or $700 heavy duty WC units I think you just lost the spirt of overclcoking in the first place; Namley, taking the lowest rated chip in an iteration, ie cheap, and making it into a $1000 CPU. Turning pyrite into gold was the beauty IMO. But you've just erased that whole concept on the front end with cooling.

With all that said I do watercool every CPU/GPU/Chipset I own. Not for performance perse but silence. It's really annoying those high rpm 60mm screamers on highend video cards and chipsets. Those loud CPU and case fans. With water, dont right, with low rpm 120mm fans gliding over radiators you can tone this down signifigantly and still have great performance, something really impossibe with air and todays hardware. (i've tried) But my units are cheapies customs which can't compare to DangerDen stuff.

I think the whole industry is about to adpot water. Apple already has G5's factory watercooled, Is Dell next? Or will Dothan save us? That still does'nt help Vcards.:)

118,

You're being just a bit of a luddite..:) sure I have two Mobile XP's over 2600Mhz which are generally somewaht fast. I'm happy 30 FPS and 10x7 is acceptable for you, But with A64, I play now at 20x15 with everything maxed on a beautiful diamondtron. With X2 A64 I will be able to encode whatever movie while doing that.;)

I don't think most of you realise how huge X2 is. Maybe this simple graphical representation will help explain the quantum leap in CPU world right now.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/cpu/athlon64-x2/res.png

OK I'm sick and tired of whiners!!! You want serious performance you got to pay money. You want serious workstation you got to pay serious dollars!!! Go buy yourself a $44 Duron or a $60 Celron if you can't handle the barriers to entry. They offer superior bang for buck of anything on planet.

Speaking of barriers to entry, it's not that different!!!

Why? Because the Intel 955X chipset is hella expensive....lowest price for Intel D955XBK board is $255 online.

So Intel D955XBK $255
Intel 820 $241
Geil DDR2 667 1GB- $150
--------------------------------------
=$646

vs.

MSI NEO4-F $80
AMD X2 4200+ $537
Corsair PC3200 VR 1GB KIT- $75
----------------------------
=$692

Which you think offers superior bang for buck? Hint: It's not even close. With a 2.8 P4E you won't be in any "game" I know of at satisfactory levels...In case y'all missed it, a 4200 beat Intels BEST chip the majority of the time @TR or anandtech let alone the lowly 820...Looking at processor price alone is a huge flaw on your parts!!

Look here at 4200 beating up 840...I wish we could see a 820 there so you'd see the light.
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2410

Intel obviously terrified to put a 820 anywhere in these reviews, the chip most of you misinformed cheap skates are looking at..I wonder why? Go look you won't find it!

I would like to see AMD release 1.8GHz and 2.0GHz X2s as well, but I imagine that the 1MB L2 parts at those speeds are turning into Opteron DC, and are the 512KB L2 parts a different core, or do they have 1/2 the cache disabled on each core because of a manufacturing flaw? Yeah, 3800+ and 4000+ 2.0GHz X2s and 3400+ and 3600+ 1.8GHz X2s may appear within 6-12 months though. Maybe AMD is worried about the clashing rating number?

Still, if you use your computer 10 hours a day, at 100W more power consumption and 10c a unit, thats 10c a day, $35 a year. So add $70 to $100 to the price of every Pentium D to account for the extra power bills!

The 2.8GHz Pentium D is interesting because of its low price, even though it will be a poor performer in everything but multithreaded or heavy multitasking apps. At $240 + $100 that's $340 for the PD. The motherboard has to use a new Intel chipset, expect them to be high cost (albeit fully featured) - $150? $200? That's $440. DDR2 memory is only a little more expensive than DDR nowadays, but even so that's $20+ as well. $10+ more for a more powerful power supply too :p The X2 4200+ isn't looking so bad now for something that is probably twice as good!

Obviously the 3.0GHz and 3.2GHz Smithfield are immediately discountable because they're even higher cost for less performance than even an X2 4200+, especially if you are merely upgrading a S939 platform. Even so, S939 boards can be had for a reasonable amount.

How does it fol.....never mind. ; )

Nice review of an incredibly desirable pair of CPUs, Scott.

One question, though. ET's review noted that the Intel system felt smoother when multitasking: the X2s hitched occasionally. Did you notice the same thing?

yap yap yap. price, AMD, Intel, LOL. I think what most people here fail to see is this. Let's dream rightr now, shall we. Let's just say the intel DC was faster and I wanted one. Ok, I would need (as it's been pointed out) new RAM, new mobo, and the CPU. Now, dream off and yes I live in AMD world right now. I have a 939 mobo, DDR 400 RAM and a A64. My PC is all set to go. Now *if* I were to buy a AMD CPU, the price hit would be small because I am ready have the platform to roll. I know if you are Intel and you have DDR2, kill that factor. It still does not account for the CPU + the mobo and that hit is one I don't like to take very often.

See I spread my upgrade over several months so the hit is not quite as hard. With the AMD offerings I can take the hit better. Anyway that is how I see it. I could be completely insane though, I mean check my user name ;0

not going to read all 100 comments, so if this is a repost, sorry.

Boing: http://www.amdzone.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=in...

ops sorry.

Great review, Scott!

The power consumption tests are especially useful for those of us interested in relatively quiet computing.

lol "Does a bear pope in the woods?"
little typo there I think.

what truely impressed me was the power consumption of the AMD CPUs. Nicely done. I thought I was going to need a nuke reactor to power my next system. What is also suprising is that AMD and intel must be sharing some info around. I mean, now the AMD chips look exactly like intel chips.

Again, then I better wait for next latest AMD 64 processor dual core. :S

. . . and intel's final advantage goes down the drain.

beaten at video encoding? say it ain't so!

i honestly don't see why anyone would upgrade to an intel machine at this point. even if you are upgrading from intel, you can reuse your ddr1 ram offsetting the price difference between intel and amd's dual core offerings (when they both become available).

and in similar fashion i'm sure we'll not only see lower cost versions of the X2, but shortly after launch the chips detailed here will get cheaper.

So, any bets when we will see quad-core CPUs from AMD or Intel? :)

Edit: "I am perfectly confident that we will see engineering samples [of quad-core processors] in 2007," said AMD’s CEO and President Hector Ruiz in an interview with CRN web-site.

AMD would have done well to abandon its True Performance Initiative now that the shift to thread-level parallelism has thrown clock speed-based performance estimates out the window once and for all.

Your argument not withstanding, Intel's "performance rating" numbers are no more useful than AMD's "speed rating". I'd argue that AMD's numbers are still quite relevant as long as they provide the consumer a picture of one processor being more powerful than the next. And 4800+ might not be entirely inaccurate in the context of today's software since not nearly all software can take advantage of dual cores. I think Intels number scheme is POOP. The Opteron scheme makes complete sense. The Athlon scheme makes sense to, if you quit thinking like

4800+ = 4.8 gigahertz (edited spelling)

and start thinking like

4800+ > 4600+ > 4400+ > 4000+

which, on the average, is all true.

I've never paid more than 280 bucks for a processor (Pentium 4 northwood 3.2) that is still serving me quite well. when are the affordable chips gonna hit?

can anyone even buy these chips?

edit: tfp answered my question: a resounding NO. So, where's all the resentment for CPU makers doing paper launches at these reviewing sites, when ATi and nVidia get reamed publicly (rightly so) in all their previews.

Ok, time to buy another server or do more load balancing. For now, you can hit a mirror at http://www2.techreport.com -- 'tis faster.

Man, I can't wait to get one of these things. I've got the motherboard I need already, all I need is the chip itself. I'm thinking that maybe the 4400+ will be a good compromise between price and performance, if prices come down a little bit from what they expect them to be. It's not that much more than the 4200+ from the charts I've seen ($581 vs. $537). The big price jump happens when you go up to the 4600+.

There's not much to complain about here, but that won't stop me from trying. I would like to see AMD extend the X2 line down two more notches by offering a couple of Athlon 64 X2 variants at 2GHz clock speeds and lower prices. I realize that by asking for this, I may sound like a bit of a freeloader or something, but hey—Intel's doing it. No, the performance picture for Intel's dual-core chips isn't quite so rosy, but the lower-end Pentium D models will make the sometimes-substantial benefits of dual-core CPU technology more widely accessible. If AMD doesn't follow suit, lots of folks will be forced to choose between one fast AMD core or two relatively slower Intel cores. I'm not so sure I won't end up recommending the latter more often than the former.

This really concerns me. Every time AMD has had an advantage, they have managed to screw it up. Every time. Keeping the cost of these things high is a bad move. If anything, even if they can't produce enough of them, they need to keep the price down. This is the time to be kicking intel in the nads, not handing them the dual core market by pricing their parts out of reach. If intel gets a headstart, even with inferior technology, then AMD will be ceding another market.

I'll jump when the prices aren't as silly, fab bottleneck or not.

Chalk up another win for AMD, but only if they're on time getting these things to market. I'm somewhat hesitant to get excited until I can buy one of these babies.

I agree that AMD needs a 2.0 GHz version of the chip to steal Intel's thunder on the low end. I wonder what the marketting strategy for AMD is by not doing this, at least immediately.

Solid review, too.

Pentium 840D draws over 100W more than a 4200+? Any idea how much of this is going to the processor? I assume not all of it because everything I've heard says that dissipating around 200W would be nearly impossible w/o water.

Damage what did you use to cool these things?

From page 1: "Does a bear pope in the woods?"

Don't you mean "poop"? Or am I missing the joke?

Don't be complaining about AMD prices. First of all, even the 4400 has superior price/performance characteristics over all dual cores. Lucky Intel did'nt throw one of their crappy cheap 820's in there or you'd see that clearly.

Then you start adding up a cheap intel system with that 820 and it's no longer so cheap anymore with thier high priced DDR2 and expensive DC mobos. About $800.

I think it will be the same price... around $800 for 4200 + 939 board + 1gig DDR.. As an 820 setup. Nevermind the AMD setup will beat 820 like a red headed step child.

4200+ is the gateway drug to ethusiast who wanted to tasted MP enviorments but, the cost requirements using professional-level board, PSU and chassis were a big turn down.

$500 is one hell of a bargin for a dually-rig with a modern CPU design no less. The 4200+ still provides enough muscle to get by single-threaded apps like gaming.

820 is cheaper but the power requirements and inferior single-threaded performacne might not be desirable for some gamers. For HTPC Ethusiasts who can manage the greater power and thermals requirements would love it's smooth-creamness and encoding power over any single-core CPU.

Damn that was some good reading.

I want.

I can't have (being a lowly student type who's already more than served by his P4M 2.8GHz laptop), but I want.
-Mole