Some positive AMD news for a change

[SlowSpyder]

After seeing the dud that is Bulldozer, I decided to go a different route for an upgrade. My PhII 940 @ 2.4/3.6Ghz was fast enough for what I do, but I still wanted to upgrade just to upgrade, and had a few bucks to spend.

I bought a PhII 1090T for $160 shipped from Newegg. I updated my AM2+ board's bios, and five minutes later I had 50% moar cores happily humming at 2.4/4GHz... well, 3.96GHz, but let me into the 4GHz club anyway, will ya?

I haven't pushed it harder, and am not sure I will. I like the easy path vs. the hours of tinkering for every last MHz path. 45nm must have matured, I am able to go 400MHz faster on 1.48v vs. my PhII 940 that wanted 1.5+ volts to hit 3.6Ghz. On my 940 3.8GHz got stuck loading the desktop, 3.7GHz booted but wasn't stable regardless of voltage/temps.

While playing HOMM6 my 940 would bounce between 75%-95% utilization. It's nice to see a game that uses four cores, anyway.

If I trust Speed Fan and my motherboard sensor (do I?) I'm only hitting ~44C* with all six cores pegged running P95. Though I do admit it's rather cool in this room right now, probably about 68F.

Anyway, this is just a semi-brag thread, but if any Thuban users have any advice on what else to tweak that's 'easy' let me know. I think 2.4GHz on the memory controller/L3 should be ok, though I could go for more... I don't know if more would do anything other than make more heat, though. If I can get a few bucks for my PhII 940 this should be a cheap upgrade, probably around $100 or so. Not too bad for moar cores and moar MHz. This AM2+ board has done well for me, so I figured I'd post something positive for AMD. Anyway, now I wait for Ivy Bridge and Pile Driver.

*edit - Bouncing between 49-50C now. P95 has been running for a while, maybe 20 minutes. Holding steady there, though.

 

[busydude]

You can easily reach 2.6-2.8 CPU-NB on E0 stepping CPU's.

EDIT: What HSF are you using?

 

[alyarb]

If you choose the easy path you'll become an agent of evil....

 

[Stoneburner]

I have an am2+ board like you. It's my understanding that you get about a 1-5 percent penalty hit compared to an am3 board with ddr3 memory.

 

[SlowSpyder]

You can easily reach 2.6-2.8 CPU-NB on E0 stepping CPU's.

EDIT: What HSF are you using?

But does that do anything for performance? I imagine after you get 'fast enough' to feed the cores nothing but heat is being added. But the question is 'what is fast enough' for six 4GHz cores, I guess.

I'm using a Scythe Ninja Copper. I know there are better coolers, though this one is still good. But I'll admit, I like the way it looks in my case.

 

[SlowSpyder]

I have an am2+ board like you. It's my understanding that you get about a 1-5 percent penalty hit compared to an am3 board with ddr3 memory.

I'm confident that there are situations where dual channel 800MHz DDR2 is holding back six cores, but more often than not it's probably ok.

 

[busydude]

But does that do anything for performance?

It depends on the application you are using.. may help significantly in games.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3877/...investigation-of-thuban-performance-scaling/7

If you feel you are being bottle necked by the CPU.. it might help ease the issue a bit.

 

[Rhoxed]

Congrats on the chip! I remember buying my 940BE around the same time as you near their release date. The 1090's are fun.

Ever since the first Phenom launched, I have tried to make it a general rule of thumb that you want to *try* and get NB speed ~1ghz apart from core speed. 4ghz/3ghz, 3.6ghz/2.6ghz etc. - My 1090T was able to hit 3ghz NB on decent volts, so I didn't shoot for higher.

 

[thilanliyan]

Thanks for bringing this up. I was about to post something about getting an AM3+ m/b with DDR3 to suit my 1055T but seeing as how it probably won't make much of a difference I will just hold off buying anything until next year.

I'll see how high I can go with the NB though, while running my CPU at 3.8GHz.

 

[sangyup81]

I'm not sure a high CPU-NB will help with a DDR2 setup but how about just do benchmarks to see how much it helps? We'd love to see your data if you do

 

[SlowSpyder]

I wouldn't mind running a few benches... what benches would be worthwhile?


*edit - Oh, and I'm surprised to see Heroes of Might and Magic 6 appears to use all six cores! I doubt many games can make use of six cores, but this one appears to do so.

 

[ocre]

Running lower speed ram isnt really to bad. You have an imc a NB. Ram timings scale with the speed of your ram, this is really what ppl overlook. I have done many test wit my old ph2 and found that the lowest timings with the highest NB gave me better Ram performance. You have to specifically run test for your ram performance because real world/apps dont change much at all. I had ddr3 1600 and played a lot with it. I did plenty of test and found some interesting results:

with everything else the same (especially NB, clocks)
ddr 1333 at 7-7-7 performs pretty much the same as 1066 5-5-5 or 1600 @ 9-9-9

out of all of those the 5-5-5 1066 wasnt a disadvantage and may have been even slightly better. What i ended up as the best setup was actually running 1250 @ 6-6-6-18. I had to bumb the vram Volts up a tiny bit to get this but the tighter timings worked better than higher ddr 1600 speeds.

I would expect ddr 800 at 4-4-4 to be in line with 1066 5-5-5 or 1333 7-7-7. I found the NB to do more than my ram because everytime i increased ram speed so did the timings which canceled out the speed. Also the NB really gave ram performance increases that peaked at 2400, goin higher did help but not as much as the first 400mhz would.

I would advice getting your NB up as high as your comfortable with and getting the best ram vs timing ratio you can get. My ddr1600 wouldnt do 1500 @ 8-8-8 but would almost do 1300 @ 6-6-6 which gave me the highest performance in all my ram test. If you can get about 900 or more with 4-4-4 you will be doing better that most ppl wit ddr3 ram runing stock timings.

with the imc/NB its your performance isnt just based on ram speed but a ram speed and ram timing ratio. with a lot of the ram today the timings scale with the speed which makes very little difference on AMD phenom 2s.

My advice

 

[daveybrat]

Thanks Spyder, after all of the waiting for Bulldozer, i'm just going to upgrade my Athlon II X4 3.0GHz cpu to an X6 1090T as well since my board is AM3 and supports it.

That should be enough of an upgrade for me to last a while. Might get a Coolermaster Hyper 212+ Evo to go along with it for overclocking.

 

[Arkaign]

Yeah the Heroes 6 thing surprises me as well. It doesn't look very much different than 5, and 5 ran like a champ on my old laptop with C2D 6400 and Intel GMA lol.

 

[SlowSpyder]

My ram is rated for 800MHz 4-4-4-12 @ 2.1v. I think I have everything set to auto... again, I like the easy/fast route where possible.

Arkaign, have you played HOMM6? It seems like they went a very different route with it. It's much more... 'cerebral' and slower paced. I'll take a screen shot of my task manager/performance tab while playing and post it in a bit. All six cores are busy. As I said, with my PhII 940 it came quite close to maxing all four cores, now I'm at a much more comfortable 35-65% CPU usage in game.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I'm confident that there are situations where dual channel 800MHz DDR2 is holding back six cores, but more often than not it's probably ok.

There might even be cases where dual-channel DDR2-800 holds back a quad-core.

I installed BOINC onto an AM2+ mobo (ASrock 780G), running XP, and it sawtooths the CPU usage, it doesn't run at 100% CPU usage steady.

Although, my personal machines (Q9300 @ 3.0), do run at 100% CPU usage.

So perhaps there's a thread-scheduling issue in XP. Or perhaps I really do have to install the AMD "Optimizer".

 

[SlowSpyder]

Thanks Spyder, after all of the waiting for Bulldozer, i'm just going to upgrade my Athlon II X4 3.0GHz cpu to an X6 1090T as well since my board is AM3 and supports it.

That should be enough of an upgrade for me to last a while. Might get a Coolermaster Hyper 212+ Evo to go along with it for overclocking.

Yea, it was a very easy upgrade. In all honesty I expected to run into problems on my AM2+, I figured it wouldn't post or something. But, it was pretty straight forward. On the first boot after installing the chip I got a checksum error, I went into the BIOS and set everything to the default settings and rebooted. I got into Windows, saw six cores and rebooted.

I pushed it to 3.8/2.4GHz, set my HT and ram divider and rebooted. After getting into Windows I decided to take my skirt off and go for 4GHz. So, I bumped the multiplier another .5x and rebooted. P95 has pased for a while, games work fine, so I'm happy.

But, I still have my NB voltage set to auto. What is a normal bump for, say, 2.6-2.8GHz on that? I have no idea what the default voltage is. Any help here is appreciated, I'll see what it can do and maybe go for a few more MHz on the core.

Thanks.

 

[gevorg]

Congrats! The Thubans are pretty hot deals at this point, especially for those who already have a mobo for them. Any new systems builders will likely to go with either Sandy Bridge or Bulldozer, so the sellers would lower the prices on Thubans even lower.

 

[thilanliyan]

I'm not sure a high CPU-NB will help with a DDR2 setup but how about just do benchmarks to see how much it helps? We'd love to see your data if you do

What benches would be best to run?

 

[exar333]

Might be a good time to switch out to DDR3 with how cheap it is. You could sell your AM2 board + DDR2 modules and probably pay a good portion of a AM3+ and 16GB.

 

[ocre]

Not sure about thurban but most quads can get 2400mhhz without any extra volts.

you could check out these ppls NB and voltages for an idea.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?244110-Post-your-CPU-NB-frequency-voltage

it will give you an idea what to expect!

 

[bryanW1995]

My 1055t thuban is awesome for DC apps, and now I get to save money by not downgrading to BD.

 

[Arkaign]

My ram is rated for 800MHz 4-4-4-12 @ 2.1v. I think I have everything set to auto... again, I like the easy/fast route where possible.

Arkaign, have you played HOMM6? It seems like they went a very different route with it. It's much more... 'cerebral' and slower paced. I'll take a screen shot of my task manager/performance tab while playing and post it in a bit. All six cores are busy. As I said, with my PhII 940 it came quite close to maxing all four cores, now I'm at a much more comfortable 35-65% CPU usage in game.

I've got it, but been so busy that I've barely had the time to mess with it yet. It works pretty well with my current i5 laptop and 2500k desktop as far as I can tell.

I loved my PhII 955BE when I had it, sounds like the X6 PhII are pretty solid, I'm glad to see more SW using more cores finally.

 

[adlep]

Another AM2+ owner here. My 965BE cloks at 3.8GHZ. The Gigabyte mobo was free AR through Microcenter.

Decent performance, cheap, and overclockable...

 

[nyker96]

I think this is one good thing about BD it makes X6 looks so much more attractive now. No need for new board, just a bios update and boom 2 more cores of goodness. and saw some lower clocked oem x6 going for under 140 on ebays. I think it might just be the ticket for next upgrade if u own a am3 board.