Athlon or Phenom?

Nevakonaza recommended a good processor. The Phenom II 550 Dual-Core also gets my vote as well. It isn't much more expensive than the Athlon II 250 but it has more high speed memory on the processor.
 
hackapelite said:
It does have truth to it, but often the chip is capable of speeds far higher than it's rated; this is simply marketing, low-clocked chips are sold cheaper and high-clocked chips for more money. Some goes for number of cores/other features.

On topic: IIRC Athlons have no L3 cache, that being a big difference. I've gathered the performance hit is around ~10% tops, but I haven't really been following the CPU situation as of late. Anyway, in any real-world apps the difference is negligible; you'd most likely only be able to actually tell the difference in heavy rendering and other crunching apps, in which case you'd better off looking at something like an i7.
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Was supposed to post this here.
 
Ahh, well I'll post what I did in the other thread then LOL.

The lack of L3 cache is most affected in gaming, with about a 20% hit in performance compared to the Phenom II clock for clock.
 
hackapelite said:
That sounds like a pretty steep hit, what games are we talking about here?
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Overall performance of the chip, especially in FP applications is pretty degraded by the loss of L3 cache. However, multitaskers will notice a benefit going with a tri or quad core athlon over a dual core phenom in real world usage.
 
hackapelite said:
That sounds like a pretty steep hit, what games are we talking about here?
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All games, just some affected more than others....pretty much whichever game is more CPU intensive will see a larger hit, simple as that.

Like bomber said, for standard multitasking an Athlon II quad would benefit over a Phenom II dual core.

However, if I had a choice between an Athlon II quad or a Phenom II triple core, I would take the Phenom II. But then again, I play games occasionally, so I need the cache.
 
So what you're saying is that if I want to play games I should go for a CPU with a L3 Cache? The Phenom over the Athlon. I'll just go for the cheapest Phenom then.

Thanks for the help.
 
Not to mention Higher L3 is great for decoding/encoding video files. On my old 5200+ dual core a 700mb file took about 1hr and on my 955be it takes less than 15min.
 
G25r8cer said:
Not to mention Higher L3 is great for decoding/encoding video files. On my old 5200+ dual core a 700mb file took about 1hr and on my 955be it takes less than 15min.
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bomberboysk said:
Thats more due to the architecture change and extra cores than the cache:P
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Yeah mostly the extra cores that help for encoding. I would imagine an Athlon II quad would have done the same work in 20 minutes or so.
 
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