I'm downright dissatisfied with my Phenom II 940's performance....

[Mechromancer]

I have a Phenom II 940 rig. Specs are in my sig. I'm dissatisfied with it. Why, you ask? Because:

It is just too damn fast! There is no reason for me to overclock it, tweak it, constantly benchmark it, or anything anymore. I have no games that stress it in the least now. It runs everything at 1680x1050 fast as hell so there is just no reason to push overclocks anymore.

I remember the good ole days when I had my Athlon XP 2100+. I got it up to 2.5Ghz and that meant something. You could FEEL the speed and it made me happy and proud of my accomplishment. My Opteron 185 even needed a boost to 3Ghz to get things done. This damn Phenom II just works fine! It goes to whatever clock I want it to go to and doesn't complain, lockup, reboot, or anything. I get 3.6Ghz stable at stock volts, or with just a little bump. This is all on AIR COOLING. I don't even have a reason to go water now.

All in all I have to say this system has ruined my enthusiast hobby. There is no hardware I want to buy now. All this crap is just too fast. The SSDs and HDDs leave you wanting for nothing. I don't even have a reason to overclock the memory. It wouldn't do much if I did. This system is just too stable and works too well for my tastes. I should have gone with a Core i7 920 so I could at least risk burning up the IMC with too many volts.

I even went as fast as to load up SuSE 11.1 Linux+Virtualization on a spare drive just to try and put pressure on this CPU. I'm desperate to slow it to a crawl in daily use. I have all of Windows Vista's Aero crap turned all the way up too.

Now I know I can't be the only one having this painful experience. What do you guys think about this tragedy in the world of AMD enthusiasts?

[biohead]

invest yourself in video editing, or things alike. of course you can stress this CPU to make it scream for mercy, you just happen to be a guy that bought a super fast computer to watch youtube and play games. i mean come on, games are no indicator of CPU speed.

[Jaivan]

You need to start crunching try WCG that'll make you want to oc the hell out of your cpu

[soundood]

but ast least you are doing somethings with it ehh?

video editing and encoding is my thing aprt from gaming and have a few comparisons for you, it also justifies the clocks that i get too







for me this is everything and justifies any overclock i get, i capture and encode a tone of video, and have done for years.

any saving on time is a plus for me.

and i do realise your post was tongue in cheek, just gave a serious answer thats all.

[G0ldBr1ck]

Its kinda nice to be in this place for once. After chasing more and more and more performance for the last 20 years I feel like I finely got there. The software folks are slacking and not keeping up with todays hardware it seems. Maybe once we get Win7 and DX11 we can get back to squeezing out every last drop of performance to get 30fps in our games.

[Movieman]

If you guys think the new single sockets from any company are fast you should try a dualie for work like video encoding.
8 cores of brutal power and even at 100% load they don't slow down.
Expensive yes, but when encoding you got to see the speed to beleive it.

[CmB]

Not quite sure I'd ever see a thread like this. But yeah, i agree the performance boost is next to nil in daily tasks. Why don't you sign up for WCG or F@H if you have unused cpu poser? Just a thought

[Mechromancer]

My Phenom II chewed up and spit out a 230mb file conversion from AVI to H.264 with AVS in 6 minutes. I think I need to bring that down to 5. Thank you so much Soundood. You also get +rep cause you watch Knight Rider on the move LOL.

[Tony]

In the scale of things the OP is dead right, I have been testing PH2 for a few weeks, 3.8 to 4GHZ was easy, 8GB ram 1066 was easy...was it fast..YUP well it felt fast then i slammed an SSD on there and boom now it felt really fast

I think AMD have hit that plateau Intel did with core2 where you start to get bored with clocking...horrid to say it out loud i know. Its now time for faster interconnect, SSD and pushing more to GPU/ co processor.

Phenom 2 has to be up there for me with my 185 opty and ther 165 dual core i ran on my uber Expert board, 4GB ram ddr500 3-3-2-8 2.35V was wonderful and im getting the same warm feeling from my new AMD CPU's but clocking them up while still fun has lost a little of the edge it used to have.

I still feel its miles more fun tweaking AMD CPU's over Intel ones...and I own the best both players have at this time.

Great 1st post Mechromancer

[charged3800z24]

I know what ya mean. My 940BE was fun, then I realized it was fast and unless I do some extreme cold I didn't see me tweaking it much anymore. I set it at 3.6ghz stock v's and let it go at that. Then I got the 720BE. I must admit, the whole 4th core thing intrigued me. I got excited again. I now run 4cores like it was ment to be one. benches like my 940BE and scores higher. I don't think I'll be buying another Phenom II for a while, Unless something with less voltage and higher clocks rolls out. I have moved on to cranking up the GPU's.

[Mechromancer]

In the scale of things the OP is dead right, I have been testing PH2 for a few weeks, 3.8 to 4GHZ was easy, 8GB ram 1066 was easy...was it fast..YUP well it felt fast then i slammed an SSD on there and boom now it felt really fast

I think AMD have hit that plateau Intel did with core2 where you start to get bored with clocking...horrid to say it out loud i know. Its now time for faster interconnect, SSD and pushing more to GPU/ co processor.

Phenom 2 has to be up there for me with my 185 opty and ther 165 dual core i ran on my uber Expert board, 4GB ram ddr500 3-3-2-8 2.35V was wonderful and im getting the same warm feeling from my new AMD CPU's but clocking them up while still fun has lost a little of the edge it used to have.

I still feel its miles more fun tweaking AMD CPU's over Intel ones...and I own the best both players have at this time.

Great 1st post Mechromancer

A fellow former-Opty 185 user!

Tony, I completely agree with you. It definitely is time for them to work on the infrastructure a bit. Hopefully we'll see big improvements with 890FX/SB800 motherboards on that front. I'd also hope AMD can get a Phenom 2.5 or 3.0 out the door with tweaks that allow it to take full advantage of all it's memory bandwidth.

Then again it is already stupid fast as is. I doubt I'll upgrade again until the software industry catches up requires all that extra bandwidth and multicore horsepower. I'm anticipating the day when I actually need to clock to 4Ghz just to make a program "fast enough" again.

[Eternalightwith]

I'm dissatisfied with it. Why, you ask? Because:
It is just too damn fast!
Now I know I can't be the only one having this painful experience. What do you guys think about this tragedy in the world of AMD enthusiasts?

Is this a joke? Please lay off the

[Rammsteiner]

Is this a joke? Please lay off the

What are you on about?

He's pretty right. OC'ing has been a big hobby of me, but since AM2 Ive yet to see such a huge increase in performance which makes me feel like YEAH!. The only thing Ive to fall back to is that Ive, in this case, a 4.2Ghz i7 for 265 Euro while the 3.2Ghz one runs 1GHz lower for 1000 Euro.

same as with my old Opty although you could see a speede increase there. had a opty 146 running at 2.8Ghz. I was seriously pissed it didnt go further while loads hit 3GHz. At once I saw the light and was satisfied since the FX-57 ran at the same speed for 8 times the price of my CPU.

But I also think that the longer you OC the more easy you go and get a better quality product which also increases speed from default settings (like chosing a 940BE over a 920). Compared to the old opty's you're quite a few levels higher when you get a PhII BE. PhII BE is aimed at a different market, exactly what we want to do. Those opty's weren't but were known to clock damn good.

Hope you guys understand a bit what I mean

[soundood]

My Phenom II chewed up and spit out a 230mb file conversion from AVI to H.264 with AVS in 6 minutes. I think I need to bring that down to 5. Thank you so much Soundood. You also get +rep cause you watch Knight Rider on the move LOL.

just to finish off some things in this forum, here is my latest result

your gonna love this, i have just finished a few optimisations on this board, and have basicaly smashed my last record for encoding



yep that 3 full minutes taken of of that time

[Mechromancer]

just to finish off some things in this forum, here is my latest result

your gonna love this, i have just finished a few optimisations on this board, and have basicaly smashed my last record for encoding



yep that 3 full minutes taken of of that time

WTF DID YOU OPTIMIZE MAN?! You went from over 5 minutes to 2.5 minutes with only a 100mhz increase in speed?! Did you find SMT in the BIOS or something?

[Sparky]

What? You crazy?

Nothing can EVER be too fast

[ecat]

3 full minutes for 100MHz increase in clock speed

My money is on magic pixie dust

[soundood]

WTF DID YOU OPTIMIZE MAN?! You went from over 5 minutes to 2.5 minutes with only a 100mhz increase in speed?! Did you find SMT in the BIOS or something?

nothing too complicated, all the previous benches where at stock HTT, and stock NB and Mem timings.

after upping the NB to 2800 and using 250 x 14, with ram at 500 4-4-4-12

this is what i get

all i can say is wow, and to be honest i dont really know how it has happened, the last 3.4 gig bench was with this board, so its not the board change.

i guess this app just loves the high NB and HTT

[demonkevy666]

nothing too complicated, all the previous benches where at stock HTT, and stock NB and Mem timings.

after upping the NB to 2800 and using 250 x 14, with ram at 500 4-4-4-12

this is what i get

all i can say is wow, and to be honest i dont really know how it has happened, the last 3.4 gig bench was with this board, so its not the board change.

i guess this app just loves the high NB and HTT

Northbridge L3 cache MHZ the phenom's secret weapon

[Kei]

Awesomeness....I shall assume/guess that in the last run perhaps you switched from ganged to UNganged which would account for such a large decrease in time encoding.

Either that or you really do have some magic pixie dust!

Kei

(Btw, I agree with the OP in that the PII is just too damn fast to bother haha)

[Kei]

Ah, okay so maybe I should've read your FULL post first and noticed that you were running stock NB the other times and now ran it at 2.8Ghz which is a massive ridiculous gain in speed. Demon is right L3/Northbridge speed is the Phenom's secret weapon.

Kei

[Mechromancer]

Ok now I have a renewed interest in overclocking. My NB is at 2.4Ghz. Soundood, can we make an arrangement for me to get that KnightRider.avi vid from you? I want to test with the exact same file you're using. Also what are the core and NB voltages you're using to get to those HTT and NB speeds?

[chew*]

Ok now I have a renewed interest in overclocking. My NB is at 2.4Ghz. Soundood, can we make an arrangement for me to get that KnightRider.avi vid from you? I want to test with the exact same file you're using. Also what are the core and NB voltages you're using to get to those HTT and NB speeds?

I agree this will be fun, I want in. The AMD knightrider.avi to .mp4 conversion bench

[soundood]

Ok now I have a renewed interest in overclocking. My NB is at 2.4Ghz. Soundood, can we make an arrangement for me to get that KnightRider.avi vid from you? I want to test with the exact same file you're using. Also what are the core and NB voltages you're using to get to those HTT and NB speeds?

hey no problem, vcore 1.45 v NB 1.3, using 1066 ram at 800 mhz, 250 HTT x 14 multi

now do you have a copy of AVS Video convertor 6?

the file is easy, i will upload it to mininova for you and PM you the link, not sure direct links to torrent sites are allowed for this kind of content, i suspect it is borderline. after all this will still have a copyright issue

your cool with torrents ehh?

[richierich]

lol @ the new KnightRider.avi bench