Computer Reviews

The new AM2 socket from AMD is developing a lot of interest in the computing world. With the untroduction of AM2 comes the introduction of nearly a full line-up of AMD processors.

AMD have released nearly all of their processors using this new socket. Most of this range have also been moved over to dual-core, which now makes up the majority of their range. As reported on bit-tech, this is in line with their strategy to slowly phase out single-core in favor of dual-core.

The 2 new top-end offerings are the FX-62 and X2 5000+. These processors feature all the new stuff to come along with these chips, both of them are dual-core and both of them have built-in DDR2 memory controllers.

The main rivals to these new offerings are the Core Duo series from Intel. Although they manage to beat out the AMD chips sometimes, there are other times where the AM2 chips shine above them.

The uniform socket connection through the range will certainly make upgrading that much easier, being able to upgrade straight to a high-end processor from a mid-range one without changing the motherboard is great.

Waiting a while would be the recommended course of action for those looking to upgrade, as there are likely to be changes made before the whole deal settles down and prices come to reasonable levels.

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The Intel Pentium D processor provides a bottom of the range option for those looking for a dual core processor without the cost involved in getting many of them.

This chip is fairly new to the market and mates two smithfield cores together, with a FSB of 533MHz, one L2 cache of 1MB each for the cores. Unlike its brothers and sisters in the 800 series of dual-core processors from Intel, which all run at 800MHz, this one runs slower at 533MHz, with a multiplier of 20 to get to a speed of 2.67GHz.

In the review at legitreviews.com they managed to push the FSB up to 760MHz without any problems from the processor and loaded up Windows and ran their tests without any problems. The actual increase in performance did not quite match the rise in processor speeds, with the overall change being about a 29% in performance or so.

The processor goes past the levels of the 840 processor and starts to come near the level set by the 840 Extreme Edition.

There is a lot or praise for this chip on the site and the test scores go to show how much it can perform, and how much you can get for your money from the lowest priced dual-core processor around. With a decent motherboard for under a hundred bucks, you will be able to get a processor that is capable or running up to 3.8GHz with a little bit of overclocking.

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Dual core processors have already made their way into the high end wordstation and server market in a big way, but have been slower to crack into the consumer market and are often relegated to those looking to upgrade to very fancy machinery.

One of the factors that comes into play is that much of the software available just doesn’t take advantage of this technology, whereas high performance systems have had it for a little while now.

With the release of 64-bit windows and now video card manufacturers making their cards capable of utilising multi-core processors and hopefully soon, gaming software to support it dual-core processors are coming into their own, slowly, but surely.

AMD and Intel take quite different routes to doing the dual-core processor thing, which can be read about in the article at pcstats. Both are bitter rivals, plugging away at their own technology to get as much as they can from their processors.

AMD has introduced Cool ‘n’ Quiet technology which effectively clocks a processor down when it is not being used heavily, so its clock speeds are lower. When the computer starts using more resources the clock speeds and voltages are returned closer to their normal levels, until they reach normal levels somewhere near 100% system demand.

The processor beats out the Pentium D 840 in all of the system tests that are performed and does so using less power, which is of great concern to those running hundreds of computers in a corporate environment, but probably less to most home users.

64 bit operating system and software also made a big difference, allowing even faster speeds with this new technology.

Check out the full article for all the details.

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