Classic British Flight Sim

Very slowly nudging SWMBO into an upgrade of the processor on my Frankenstine like PC and am seriously considering an AMD Phenom II x4 965 BE. Whilst I would still need to replace my MB I can at least keep the memory so it helps keep the costs down (a bit). Has anyone else here experience of the Phenom range and got any views/thoughts on its capabilities?

Mind you at the rate I'm going - just planted the first "upgrade" seed - it will take at least 6 months before anything pops out of the ground!

Regards,
Chris

Hi Chris

I think Tony Madge has a Phenom based system so fingers crossed he pop's in to give you the high's and low's of Phenom ownership

ATB

DaveB

Thanks for that Dave . With a stock speed of 3.4Ghz and plenty of overclocking potential (could I see 4Ghz for the first time) it seems like a good choice. The only thing missing will be the opportunity to use the latest memory sticks (talking about memory, for the life of me I can't remember what designation is for this new memory!) and of course a move away from the Intel upgrade path but again that would require a new MB and new memory - I already have 1066Mhz memory sticks.

Regards,
Chris

Hi Chris

This is Tony's spec as taken off his sig..

AMD Phenom II X2 550 4 cores 3.60GHz
Gigabyte GA-MA770T-UD3P Motherboard
Corsair Dominator 4GB DDR3 XMS3 PC2-1600C9 Ram
Gainward GTX 260 896MB GPU 625 MHz 2200MHz 216 Cores
3x SATA hard drives
Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro CPU Cooler
OCZ ModXStream Pro PSU

I have a feeling he unlocked 2 cores himself and the possibilities for overclocking are limited only by how much nerve you have (I was going to say phenominal but you can see why I didn't) I'm sure the old git will be here with words of wisdom in the not too distant

ATB

DaveB

Hi Chris, a bit slow getting to this post due to painting the house yuk...
Ok AMD, yes I am a fan I like the Intel range but have for the past 3 pc's had AMD I find them incredible value and good performers. I opted for the 550BE which is 3.1ghz 2 core chip, now AMD make all their Phenoms 4 core then disable 2 of them for the 550, if your lucky you can get the other two cores to work with a slight bios change if you have the right board... I got mine to unlock the extra two cores and it is overclocked to 3.6ghz, which is a superb result.
I can with my set up change to the 965 as the motherboard will work with this chip. I only opted for the 550 for cost. I bought the stuff ready to go at overclockers.com
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprodu ... 39&subcat=
superb value at £295 and it comes overclocked already for you!!!

and then added a better PSU and a GTX260 card.
I can get over 400fps in fs9!! But I run eNhancer to smarten the graphics etc and it locks it at 40 to 60 fps more than good enough, it was similar performance in FSX as well
Overall I would jump at the 965 which offers superb value and if you get the later 125 watt version it will clock 4ghz with ease
Shop around for the 965 125w version as overclockers seem to list only the 145 watt.

Hope this helps if you need any more info let me know.
Tony

Very useful info that - thanks Tony! I hadn't noted the difference between the 125w and 145w so will now be after the 125w version (when the idea of an upgrade takes root in SWMBO), could be months, could be days but I suspect I have a lot of decorating to do either way.

Regards,
Chris