I hope that our audience from the US had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. Now we’re back to the grind for a month-long sprint in anticipation of several exciting launches at next year’s Consumer Electronics Show. I can’t give much away, but there will be plenty to read about in the first week of 2010.
New CPUs In The 2009 Desktop Charts
First things first. I know that our Graphics Charts are in dire need of an update now that ATI’s Radeon HD 5000-series cards are at least dribbling onto the streets a few at a time (never mind the fact that they’re universally out of stock) and Nvidia has a handful of DirectX 10.1 boards (are those crickets chirping?) in the channel.
The good news, however, is that our 2009 Desktop CPU Charts have been updated to include the following processors (in addition to the models that were already tested):
AMD
Phenom II X2 545 (3 GHz)
Athlon II X2 245 (2.9 GHz)
Athlon II X2 240 (2.8 GHz)
Athlon II X2 235e (2.7 GHz)
Athlon II X3 435 (2.9 GHz)
Athlon II X3 425 (2.7 GHz)
Athlon II X3 405e (2.3 GHz)
Athlon II X3 400e (2.2 GHz)
Phenom X4 9350 (2.0 GHz)
Phenom X4 9150 (1.8 GHz)
Intel
Core i7-950 (3.06 GHz)
Core i7-870 (2.93 GHz)
Core i5-750 (2.66 GHz)
Check out the full list of processors and compared benchmarks on the 2009 Desktop CPU landing page.
An ATI Update
It’s too bad that ATI still seems to be fighting the availability issues that hampered adoption of its Radeon HD 4770—a card that served up solid mainstream performance within a reasonable thermal footprint. I’ve read a number of interviews with ATI seeking an explanation, estimated volume numbers, and guesses as to when the 5000-series boards are going to be more available.
The fact is that none of it matters.
If you're willing to spend $309 on a 5850, keep an eye out tomorrow!
If you want a Radeon HD 5850, 5870, or 5970 this holiday season, you’re going to have a hard time finding one (looks like Newegg is expecting some 5850s tomorrow, at least). And if you do, you’re going to pay more for it than you might have expected after reading my reviews of those three boards. Thus, I’ve updated brief passages in each card’s write-up to reflect today’s pricing. They’re all still super-fast and feature-laden, but the damn things are outright difficult to track down.

Sure it's stock speed and turboboost is set higher but it's clock range is the same between the 860 and 870, 660Mhz and 670Mhz respectively.
Now I know a few people will say that if this is true then the performance numbers should be the same but viewing some of the numbers on other sites they are a little different but I would like to see Toms do it because they are a little more thorough.
I'll pass your feedback on to the team working on charts.
I think it's bull $hit saying that the Atom powered desktops don't perform!
For years we've been using 1,6Ghz processors and lower,and never even mentioned the system was in some respect slow!
In fact, today I still use an EeePc701, booting winXP, with a 630Mhz core, and it works pretty ok for most things...
It even displays 720p video on it's tiny 480p screen (when overclocked to 1Ghz)!
It does not have the more powerful graphics card the Zotiac system has, and it uses 400Mhz DDR2 RAM. In any way it is supposed to be slower than the zotiac system, yet with a few XP mods, it works like a charm!
Generally I leave it running @800Mhz, to not have lags with typing and other things, but, come on!
10 years ago, there where those still using windows 98 with a 166Mhz CPU!
Though old by the standards of then, if people could do most they needed to do with a 166Mhz processor, how much more with a 1,6Ghz processor?
Have we become spoiled?
Is an ION platform by any means lacking for the average user?
The average user does NOT compress video's!
He does seldom compress audio.
He sits behind his PC, to internet, chat, use Excel and Word, and perhaps some stock-market program; he listens to audio, and watches 720p video's, and HD youtube video's. All of which the ION platform is doing a great job, especially now that flash video has been hardware accelerated on the 9300/9400 series graphics card from NVidia.
OK, you can't game on it, and running Vista sucks. That's a Vista issue, not an Atom issue.
Are you guys planning on adding CPU/GPU charts for laptops in the future?
It is currently kind of hard to find decent information about how laptop GPUs and CPUs stack against each other. I, for one, would love to see how ULV cpus (mainly SU4100, SU2300, SU7300) fare against regular Cpus and maybe the lowly Atom.
I would also love to see a comparison between mobile GPUs (9400M, GT2X0M, Radeon HD 4XX0, and even Intel 4500MHD)
A lot of people are looking to buy a netbook or an ultra-portable, and relevant charts would be very helpful.
I certainly see your point. The SU4100 is almost always paired with either an intel 4500M or an intel 4500MHD
The SU7300 is almost always paired with a 4500MHD or (in the case of an ASUS UL50) an nVidia GT210M.
How about cross charts with CPU/GPU combos?
You would run benchmarks on different machines and come up with an average on, say, a specific game or benchmark (I'm thinking video playback tests) for a specific CPU/GPU combo, and then you'd build a chart for that game or benchmark with the CPUs on the X-axis and the GPUs on the Y-axis, with the understanding that some of the cells would be empty.
While the result would not be as unbiased and accurate as a benchmark run on a custom built desktop, it would provide some helpful hints for the potential buyer.
Good catch, fixed!
However, instead of a mobile GPU evaluation (which I would love) how about a chipset evaluation? As in, we see:
-Pentium Dual Core, with 4500
-Core 2 Duo with 4500
-Celeron with 4500
-Turion II with Radeon 4200
-Sempron(and other single cores) with Radeon 4200
as integrated chipsets. In each of these, ONLY the processor varies (RAM, HDD, Windows config could be done by you guys to equalize these variables). You could run some benchmark programs or games on these, and for each platform use a variety of CPU's... for instance, Turion II M300, M500, M6X0, etc... all have the Radeon 4200, so which CPU should you get; at which point is upgrading the CPU pointless due to the igp? And the same with the Pentium Dual Core with their little 4500's. Does a faster PDC enable better gaming/media with the same igp?
I think integrated video is an entirely different matter than a GTX260M (or other dedicated mobile GPU), as it can be paired with a huge variety of mobile CPU's and chipsets. Systems with actual video cards should probably be evaluated on a system level, because there is so much going on. Although you know, if you really wanted to, there are tools that will evaluate just a GPU. There's a portion of 3DMark, I believe, that measures its capacity, and that of the the CPU separately.
I personally would love to see what's going on in the mobile realm with performance, and not just have to rely on going to Best Buy to see what score Windows 7 gives the components of random laptops, because that is nowhere near exacting enough for me. There are NO articles about how these new platforms perform. Just individual laptops, which all have different crapware on them. Remove the junk, benchark the hardware. It's crazy... we know SO much about how every single desktop CPU, even the ones that your readers probably aren't at all interested in, perform- but nobody bothers to analyze laptop hardware these days. Laptops are becoming more and more popular and some say desktops are dying out. Please, analyze these mobile platforms for us! Nobody else is doing it, and I know you have the capacity. Back in '04 when the Mobility Radeon 9700 hit us, everyone went crazy. We're leagues ahead of that now, and laptops are more popular as well as being used for a much wider variety of tasks, and yet we fail to pay any attention to them.
Try and find any information about the Mobility Radeon 4200, I dare you. You'll find forum posts speculating on what the core actually is, how many sp's it has, how they enabled DX10.1 or if it was there in the 3200 as well but disabled... but no good info. Nothing solid. And NO performance figures. The mobile version is different than the 785G, obviously- they're related, but that's a desktop platform. Like mobile graphics/chipsets, there is no information on the performance of the Athlon 2650e, L110, M500, any of that. Yet these chips are sold all over the place.
You guys are my one of my favorite hardware info and review sites- don't fail us in the mobile realm!
Thanks for all your hard work guys,
Decembermouse