bleh, cheapest one here is 125 euros, and i'd rather get the 1090T. As for the OP, i think a higher clocked chip with a few less cores is better for gaming anyway, perhaps getting a dualy is a bit overdone, but i'd prefer a cheaper/faster quad over a x6 if gaming is the main purpose. You can also get a x4 970 (3.6 GHz) for the price of a 2.8 GHz x6.

Thats cool, i wasnt slamming you or anything, just trying to offer some insight.

I understand the whole money/leftover build situation, and i was watching bulldozer as well, i just hope thuban prices wont rise before i get to pick one up for the GFs PC, since there is no way i'd drop a bulldozer in there, i'd rather stick with the 940 she has right now.

I voted CPU, even though at the time it was more of a complete core upgrade, the only components i kept where HDD and RAM, although the mobo/vga upgrade were sort of neccesitated by moving sockets.

I upgraded from a s754 AMD 3400+ to an s939 3800+ x2, and in the process went from a single geforce 6800 to two 6800XTs in SLI (a single XT is inferior to an normal 6800, although they OCed like MAD, 325 MHz stock, got them to 475 before they got buggy). The dual core cpu was the most noticable though.

I've done the SSD thing too, which was pretty nice, and everything after using that machine, every other machine seemed old and sluggish, but by the time i got the SSD, i was pretty much out of the pc gaming scene and didnt do much intensive stuff, so performance isnt that important to me these days, my "main rig" is an IBM thinkpad t43 running linux.

No, that's fine, what gets on my nerves is the constant "crashing an instability" Gunk people spread about windows. I am a pretty hardcore linux-zealot in my own private life, but i have to admit that ever since XP, pretty much everything in terms of crashing/instability is either faulty hardware or user error (or in the case of my glacial windows XP work laptop, insufficient hardware for the task at hand).

Sure dislike/drop windows for whatever reason you want, but once you type "windoze" in your post, i stop taking you seriously.

I guess you game a lot, and even though the GPU is mostly the limiting factor in games, your CPU could be holding you back significantly with that matchup. If your motherboard will take it, a 3.0 GHz athlon II shouldnt be very expensive, but a very decent upgrade.

I do get it, in both cases, the CPU is limited by the external video card in the benches, producing near equal results, in two games the GPU is held back by the A8 3850 more then by the 1100T, producing better numbers for the Thuban, the onboard GPU for the A8 is irrelevant.

And yes, the hybrid crossfire idea is nice, and might be an interesting value for budget gaming, but in terms of pure CPU performance Llano has nothing on deneb/thuban. Sure Llano has its niche, and might be an interesting cpu in certain cases, but stop trying to say its a better performing chip then thuban, when it simply isnt

Those bench numbers look rather GPU limited, and in the cases where they arent GPU limited on both cpu's, the 1100T leads by 25-30%, which is somewhat in line with what i would expect in terms of single core performance, seeing how most games wont effectively utilise the two extra cores the 1100T has over the A8.

You are basically saying "see, the A8 is nearly as good as a 1100T in scenarios in which the CPU isnt the decisive factor". Also, if you are going to use a dedicated GPU, you would be better off with an Athlon II x4 640, which runs at a higher clock and doesnt waste diespace/power/money on an unused onboard GPU.

very ironic indeed, it is very sad to see AMD gamble the good old netburst-play and then foul it up (as is to be expected really). Even if they had the process-control which intel enjoyes, building something a tad inefficient and praying for the clocks to compensate is just stupid.

It also reminds me of the original Phenom, AMD overreached themselves on features, didnt provide solid IPC improvements (although for Phenom, there actually was some improvement over K8), and then fumble the clock speed so as to make an uncompetitive product. I just hope they can recover from this with a second Phenom II, sadly though, i dont see a new die-shrink comming anytime soon

and how are game benches of the integrated GPU of Llano relevant to the comparison of the Llano cpu to the deneb/thuban cores?

Yes, if you want a budget machine which can also run a few games decently, Llano is a cheaper route then deneb/thuban, if however you want cpu performance, Llano is about as irrelevant as they come

Two sticks isnt a requirement for modern cpu's, and as far as i know, there are no timing boosts to be had (but then again, i've been out of the game for a few years). The benefit is that with a dual channel setup, you get twice as much memory bandwidth, and in modern systems under certain use cases that is a genuine bottleneck. Some benchmarks show 10% performance increase going from ddr 1333 to 1600, now imagine the impact of not adding 25%, but 100% bandwidth.

What? i'd like to know how a A8 3850 (which is basically a 2.9 GHz athlon II X2, better known as a l3-less PII) can keep up with a 1075T.

Sure, for general browsing/wordprocessing the A8 is more then sufficient, but once you get into stuff you would actually need a quad-core for, the PII chips are superior.

Yes, if you are building a new surfer-box for mom, by all means get a A6/A8, but if you do any gaming/encoding stuff, the few extra tenners for a PII x4/x6 pay off. I agree with the intel i5 2400 recommendation, but i'm looking at this from the perspective of having a fully functional AM2+ mobo with 8 GB of ram which i might want to plop a new cpu into, currently the 1090T looks like the winner.

i'm pretty sure the 300W figure there is for the full test rig, not the chip itself, just to somewhat blunt that shock.

I agree though, bulldozer isnt pretty and the analogy of the P3-P4 intel phase is striking.

i've only seen the 8150, no other chips out there yet.

My main comparison point is the x6, since i'm looking at upgrading from a x4 940, so far it looks like the 8150 has serious trouble beating the x6 1100T in anything but the heaviest threading and a few x264 encoding benches. So it looks like i'll pick a 1090T for 100 bucks less then the 8150.

Bulldozer might be interesting from an architectural standpoint, but to me it looks like they gimped the execution hardware and tried to make up for that with rather massive L2 caches and subsequently Global foundries fumbled the ball on the production, meaning Bulldozer isnt hitting the clock speeds needed for being competitive.

I'm sort of hoping for AMDs sakes that this will turn out like the original phenom, it was inovative and all, but failed to hit clockspeeds and ran hot, then AMD did a major refactor of that chip and shrunk it to 45nm and suddenly Phenom II turned out quite well.

This sob-story was posted on redit a few weeks back, it is nice that her family is trying to get that stroke victim back, but the truth is that flying out to the south pole isnt exactly easy, and once a stroke victim is stabilized, there isnt much to do after the first 24 hours.

I'd be more upset if they risked a three man flight crew in dangerous conditions then if this woman has to wait a few more months

Have you learned nothing from how chinese immigrants behave in other countries? Now the guys up in the ISS finally can have cheap take-out and dry-cleaning!