Phenom 9600 ?'s

[picachux]

I have a friend who is willing to sell me a Phenom 9600 on the cheap. I am tempted but I was wondering if I should be worried that this chip has the TLB error. My question is should I be worried at all? I am looking into getting back into some light pc gaming and I do alot of video encoding.

 

[myocardia]

If you are planning on ever trying to run a Virtual Machine (one operating system running inside of another), then don't buy that processor. If you aren't planning on running any VM's, it's a decent enough chip, as long as your motherboard can handle it. The reason I say that is because there are only a handful of AM2 motherboards that can, and even quite a few AM2+ boards that can't. BTW, how much is he selling it for? They're selling very cheaply now, brand new, with a warranty.


edit: I just checked, and the 9600 is selling @ newegg for $120.

 

[picachux]

$75

I was planning on getting a Foxconn A7DA-S board.

 

[myocardia]

That's a good price. I don't know anything about that particular motherboard, but it does support Phenoms, and also has both the northbridge and southbridge chipsets you'll want to use with Phenoms, so it should be just fine, if not better. Let us know how it goes, if you get that board, will you?

 

[picachux]

Will do, Thanks for the quick responses.

 

[rocketbubba]

I've been using a 9500 for about 6 months now and have not had any problems whatsoever. No BSODs - nothing. I use it for light gaming and daily use. I have been happy with it. $75 is a bargain. If you don't want it, please let me know!

 

[taltamir]

motherboards bios can disable a part of the chip resulting in the TLB bug (look for the "enable TLB fix" option in bios after putting in an affected CPU). if you do it will be somewhat slower, but will never have the TLB bug occur.
For 75$, i'd take it.

 

[picachux]

Thanks for encouraging words, I do have one last question. Does Vista 32bit still have issues with 4gb (2x 2gb) Ram?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16820134641


Is 4gb even necessary, Would I be better served getting 2GB PC2-1066?

 

[taltamir]

i highly recommend 4GB. it is the single most important upgrade at the moment... 4gb of fast DDR2 is 70$.

I highly recommend 64bit, 32bit programs run on it fine, there are now drivers for anything new, and natively 64bit programs run faster. (sometimes more then twice the speed. I benchmarked 7z compression as 27% faster)

Vista32bit never had any "issues" with 4gb, it is just inherantly incapable of addressing more then 4GB total, and that includes video card ram and other reserves space. so on a 4GB system you will see ram = 4GB - video ram size - reserved space.
It will, however, list 4GB as your known max ram, it will just not use it (too many people complained to ms about it being "unable to see its my ram".).
So realistically expect to get only 3GB max in a 32bit machine.

 

[picachux]

Alright I will take the plunge since I have the $$$ available now. I was just asking because I have read about hardware needing special drivers that support 4gb of ram. (TV Tuners/X-Fi) Also heard about issues installing Vista with 4gb and encountering BSOD's.

 

[taltamir]

there was a bug in vista 64bit (not 32bit, or maybe ALSO 32bit) RTM that if you had 4GB during installing you would have BSOD. It was quickly fixed, but you had to install with 2GB, update using windows update, and then put in the 4GB of ram.
Like every MS os before or after, the original release is full of bugs. SP1 fixes all the major issues and is solid enough to use. Just make sure you install from an SP1 disk.

creative drives are the worst in the entire industry, I will never use a creative card again. (well, unless they magically start making good drivers, which I don't see happening). Which is a shame cause they make the best hardware. their name "creative labs" is appropriate, they are a lab that makes impressive hardware, not a quality products.

Anyways there is nothing "special" about vista or 64bit drivers. Every piece of hardware always needed drivers to work, and drivers had to be rewritten for almost every single MS OS.

It should be pointing out that manufacturers are dropping support for windows XP now, latest nvidia drivers for example are only available for vista 32 and vista 64bit.