Phenom II X4 955 BE or i7 920?

for future proof i would get 920

All benchies show 955 is the high res choice, trust me it smokes all games.

My dual Opteron has 8 threads and I rarely use more than four or five of them.

I'm going to go ahead and assume the same since they both have Hyper threading which AMD invented.

thanks

Just goes to show you the 955 owns. Waiting for a ATI 5000 series x2 at the end of July numbnuts. Intel fanboys I tell ya. Hate the game not the player.

Jeez Soldier37 whats your problem? and he was making fun of ATI not Nvidia , and even if he is an Intel fanboy you sound like an AMD fanboy since your protecting AMD with such fervor!

^+1 AMD used to be the best, but right now its literally right behind Intel.

I cant tell Intel beats me from my end. I play every game maxed settings 1920 x 1200 including Crysis just fine! Plus I saved money. Core I7 isnt all that like you all think. Cant stand people that think so. Who gives a squirt of pee how many threads i7 has, I sure dont. 4.2Ghz x 4 cores, 8 gb of DDR3,Blu Ray,Raptors in Raid 0/1 VelociRaptor,64 bits and 28 inches of real estate = gaming/multimedia bliss...

Agreed. +1

If you want the fastest processor, go with the I7 920... but if you want to save about $100~150, go with PII 955.

Soldier is the biggest amd fanboi on the board. The majority of us just ignore him.

The 975 isn't needed. My C0 920 went to 4.3Ghz

While I agree he seems to be a pretty big AMD fanboy, this site needs a few people like him to balance out the very high amount of Intel fanboys. Honestly, the difference between the two is so tiny and the only place you're going to notice it is audio/video encoding, and syntehtic benchmarks and that has been proven time and time again. If you aren't one of those people who has to spend about $100-$200 more for your proc/mobo just to win in synthetic benchmarks and be able to say that you have the very best (even if it is only by a little), then the PII 955 might be for you. but if you are one of the afforementioned people, then sure, get the i7 920 and be happy with it. I just can't stand people telling everyone that they need to spend the extra money so they can have the "very best" intel proc when the AMD works just as well in everything except audio/video encoding and synthtic benchies (which shouldn't even be a big deal anyway, I mean what's the point? It's a SYNTHETIC benchmark, it doesn't reflect real life tasks at all so I don't see why you have to have the top score), and has been recorded outperforming the i7 920 in gaming multiple times. Right now, if you don't use audio/video encoding on your computer on a daily basis, the PII 955 is a much better value.

The Phenom has Hyper-threading? AMD invented? AMD invented Hypertransport ( QPI ), meaning they put a memory controller on the die which ran at a seperate frequency from the northbridge, allowing it to access the CPU to access the RAM w/o going through and waiting on the northbridge. As much as I want to believe in AMD again, the phenom has the same underlying architecture introduced in the Athlon 64x2, just adapted for four cores. throw in a focus on L3 ( vastly slower than L2 ) cache meant for use with multiple applications rather than singular intensive apps IE gaming and you've got a CPU that will be easily beaten game wise by a Core 2 Quad at the same frequency ( Focus on large amounts of L2 cache, same underlying structure as the i7, just w/o hyper-threading ) Intel adapted ideas AMD implemented and did it better. Adding 200mhz does not a flagship make.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading

stop posting those damn pics, it is so annoying.

First, stop posting the damn screenshots. We get the idea already. You have a 955, and you love it.

Second, for future reference, there's a button on your keyboard. It's just above the insert and delete keys, to the right and above the backspace key. See it? It says "Print Screen". This button will stop people from laughing at you when you use a camera to take pictures of your monitor in order to get a screenshot. In addition, if you have Vista, you can use the snipping tool, found under "accessories" in the start menu.

^+1 wonderful suggestion. Video cards will always deliver more FPS then anything else.

The 1366 motherboards are sub 200 now. Foxconn has one for 179.99

^+1 Giving him major ownage eh?

^ or the picture with him and the girl.

Hello' I have the AMD 955 also, but my system only shows it at 1.61 GHz.

I have a MA790FXT-UD5P GIGABYTE board, 4gb of ddr3 memory, HD4870 1GB graphic card and a 750power supply.
Do I need to flash my bios and so can you please help me out.

Thanks.

is it still smart to buy the i7 920 when in September they will be discontinued and the x58 mobo will be useless?

So you are trying to say that because an i7 can score 30,000 in 3dmark, and it can encode audio and video so much quicker, that someone who is going to use the computer for gaming should drop the extra $100-$200 on the i7 system over the P2 system even though they are even in benchmarks for real games, and the P2 has also been shown to pull ahead on multiple occasions? So what if that person took the extra $100-$200 they saved from the i7 system and threw the extra money toward a better GPU? Then for their real life uses, the P2 955 is the better buy hands down. Synthetic benchmarks are just that, SYNTHETIC! Who cares what you score in 3dmark, as long as your system runs the games you want to play, then why does it matter?

In this thread, the OP didn't say if he had a budget, but the fact that he is deciding between the i7 920 and the P2 955 would lead me to believe that he is on a budget, and the fact is, no matter how much you want to argue, that on a budget, the P2 955 is the smarter buy if it's for a gaming system, which is what the OP is building his system for.

Here is a slightly older article on the Phenom II 955 CPU with a graph showing a value comparison between it other AMD and Intel CPU's.The Core i7 920 is shown.The prices have changed a bit since then but it is a decent article.
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/16796/1

Here is the graph at nearly the end of the article.The first graph shows the cost per performance for various CPU's.More importantly the second graph shows the cost per performance for a system.
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/16796/14

As you can see it is desired to have a high performance CPU at the least system cost.
So it looks as from this chart in this article the AMD Phenom X4 955,Intel Quad Core Q9550 and the
Intel Core i7 920 are pretty good from the performance per system cost.Many other CPU's are close though in addition.
The Phenom II X4 955 for those who desire to spend less and the Core i7 920 for those desiring a more powerful system at a reasonably low price.
Once one spends too little on a cheap CPU for the total system then it isn't economically viable.This is also true if one spends too much on a CPU.
Here is another older article Comparing the earlier Phenom II's to Intel's CPU's.
As of this articles date only the Phenom II 940 existed but the Core i7's are shown.
http://www.behardware.com/articles [...] eturn.html

There are lots of articles and various benchmarks.It's for the buyer to decide his choice.

For me I would choose the Core i7 920 because I mostly am going to use it to run Microsoft Flight Simulator X.I supported AMD in the past building a Phenom 9850 BE system early last year and was pleased with the smoothness in FSX due to the high memory bandwidth.The frame rates were less on average than Intel's Quad's but no distracting stuttering whatsoever.The Core i7's have even better bandwidth now so that one advantage that AMD previously had, Intel has improved upon with their Core i7 line and QPI.I think I'll wait for a few weeks until the D0 stepping is available hopefully at newegg to build a Core i7 system.I am a little bit nervous on this as I am familiar with Pins on my CPU though.
If I were the O.P. I would make my choice on what I applications and games I was using it for.

AMD gives 4 PCIE slots.