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Clive Webster

Reviews - AMD: laughing or crying?

Posted at: 3rd January 2008

You may remember that Issue 48 turned out to be a bit of an Intel issue, with each of the four CPUs we tested worthy of an award. Nvidia has also had a good year, with GeForce 8800s dominating the Elite list. Thankfully, this issue marks the start of AMD/ATI's fight back in the shape of the 'native' quad-core Phenom CPU in our epic processor Labs test. We also have new AMD chipsets and ATI graphics cards.

Let's start with the good news, which is that ATI now has a GPU worth buying. The Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 costs £107 and offers a lot of performance. So great is the price-to-performance ratio that the card proudly occupies a place on the Elite list. However, the HD 3870 is merely a higher-clocked HD 3850, which inflates the price to near-GeForce 8800 GT levels, but sadly not the performance. Still, it's good that the HD 3850 presents Nvidia with some competition.

Intel, on the on the other hand, must be smirking at the new Phenom processor. It's taken AMD ages to release its first quad-core CPU, while Intel has been making oodles of cash with its quad-core processors. This trend will continue unless AMD can improve the speeds of Phenom or lower the cost. Here's hoping that the triple-core Phenom proves to be a better offering.

This is unfortunate, as AMD wants you to combine the three new releases to create some kind of Mighty Morphin Power Ranger PC, codenamed Spider. Use the new 790FX chipset, and you can install up to four HD 3000-series graphics cards in CrossFireX. However, if the AMD CPU isn't much cop, you'll probably either stick with your current CPU or buy an Intel model. Buying from Intel means that you probably won't switch to the new 790FX chipset, which means that you won't have CrossFireX and will therefore only use one or two of the new graphics cards at most. However good CrossFireX or the new 7-series chipset may be, they're let down by Phenom - which is odd, considering that the company peddling it is primarily known as a CPU manufacturer.

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