Maxwell Render | Official public forum

Just specking this, looks like a good bang for little bucks.

AMD Phenom 9500 Quad Core 95watts AM2+ 4MB Cache 2200MHz
£133.30
ASUS M3A AMD 770 Socket AM2+ 8 channel audio ATX Motherboard
£56.45
Antec TruePower Trio 550W PSU
£69.13
Samsung SpinPoint HD501LJ 500GB SATAII Hard Drive
£59.50
Pny Quadro Fx 550/16xpci-express
£130.00
PCICASE Hyperline II Black/Silver ATX Tower Case
£21.98
Corsair 4GB Kit (2x2GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 Memory C5(5-5-5-18)
£79.99
Vista Ultimate x64Bit
£106.87

Total £657.22 inc vat


btw, the Quadro fx550 is a really nice card, got one here already and 'feels' better on work tasks than the gforce7800gt that I also have......good price too, and it's quiet.

Any thoughts on improvements?

So are Phenoms available in stores now?

hi glebe,

speaking of phenom.. i think the time is not right to buy it. unfortuneatly.
You know of it`s "errata 298" in the L3 cache? it`s about 5-30% slower with the bugfix applied to it than what it should be. ouch. you can google " Phenom errata"

so i would recommend to wait for their next stepping, which will correct the bug.

In the meantime performance/price/overclockability champ is still the q6600
with G0/slacr stepping (the 95w version), imho. and they almost cost the same! ( as low as 200€ in some stores!)

If you want a small machine (maybe justa rendernode) check this board:

ASUS P5E-VM HDMI

it`s micro-Atx with onboard graphics (G35) and overcklocks like a atx one. (I just built 3 machines on it, and they run very well )

So i would get a q6600 and clock it to ~3ghz (easily possible), something that you certainly can`t do with the phenom

And if you can .. get the fx1700, it`s a series 8000 (dx10 , pxsh 4.0 etc...) chip with decent ram at an acceptable price.

compare here:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_11761.html

cheers,
Daniel

Cheers Daniel, that MB looks really good.

hmm...maybe the q6600 is better then, but I'll wait and see pricing on the 'fixed' phenomes.

Intel look as though they have performance chips sewn up. Their Q6600 is nice but soon the new Q9300, Q9450 & Q9550 processors will be out - increased performance with less heat. When prices settle the Q9450 should be about the same price as the present Q6600.

Becco_UK wrote:Intel look as though they have performance chips sewn up. Their Q6600 is nice but soon the new Q9300, Q9450 & Q9550 processors will be out - increased performance with less heat. When prices settle the Q9450 should be about the same price as the present Q6600.

Isnt there some issues with overclocking these newwer chips ? something about the fsb speeds??

well, their fsb is 333x8 so the multiplier is lower than on the eg. q6600. (fsb 266x9)
_which can be a limiting factor in overclocking as you start to cook the mobo
a lot when the fsb goes towards 400.