You might want to take a stab at Kyle too while you're at it.....

He got one Phenom runnin' at 3GHz here HardOCP: AMD Phenom & Spider vs Intel QX9770

Conclusion is clock performance scaling not very good...

Many programs especially games like big caches. Even though the Prescott was slower than Northwood, the 1MB (and later 2MB) L2 cache provided some performance gains (the Northwood had only 512KB L2 cache). Northwood was never a flop, was considered faster clock to clock and was cooler than Prescott. And the Northwoods competed head to head with K7 at that time (that was before K8 and Prescott came into the picture). It was Willamette that lost to K7.

Never got around going into the K6 territory though I had worked with one in my previous (previous..) job, but during those times Pentium-IIs are whole lot faster (and, believe it or not, K6s were really rare in most workplaces!). I did deviate once and the only AMD processor I had (and still owned) is an Athlon 850MHz Socket-462 (Thunderbird core), fast but very hot(!). Then moved back to Intel again after that (Northwood)

We saw that quite some time ago.. just didn't want to comment much of it, basically the outcome was still the same as other Phenom (non Black Edition) reviews.

Anyway, just for your information.... try looking up on Google (or other search engines) on this...

"A clock interrupt was not received on a secondary processor within an allocated time"

Seems that some batches (quite a number, really) of Phenom shipped came with a defective or much slower 3rd core. This caused BSODs even on stock clocks, and its NOT related to the TLB bug... Possibly now we are beginning to see the reason for AMD's upcoming Triple Core... So anyone with Phenoms encountering this problem, suggest or recommend RMA that processor...

This post has been edited by lex: Feb 21 2008, 10:48 AM

If no BSOD then it should be OK, possibly not the defective batch... However, to test it, try stressing all 4 cores at once (most of the time only 2 cores used on most programs)..

More info here...

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=175878
http://forums.amd.com/forum/messageview.cf...d=y&STARTPAGE=1
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/248265-2...ing-flaky-cores

... the rest search on Google...

It started since Phenom became available. They thought it was the TLB issue, but even after the patch was applied, the problem continued. Then some of the owners noticed the actual source of the problem during testing... rest is history.

As can be seen from those links, RMA was the best choice and they got back a full working quad core.... UNLESS you want to continue using a "triple core"?

Concerning the cherry picked benchmark, it doesn't really show the whole picture.

Full report on B3 Phenom X4 9850 here http://techreport.com/articles.x/14424

The 3.5GHz overclock may not be 100% stable as the author stated and its on water cooling.

Preliminary Phenom X3 benchmarks here http://en.expreview.com/2008/03/31/core-2-...-8600-who-wins/

More B3 Phenom benchmarks, come and get 'em...

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/displ...om-x4-9850.html
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3272
http://www.hothardware.com/articles/AMD_Ph...50_B3_Revision/