Along came the spider ...

Hey everyone, and finally .. welcome to our AMD Phenom article.

After months of eagerness, AMD has launched its Phenom desktop processors and "Spider" platform for desktop PCs. The new Phenom chips feature a native quad-core design, a 65-nanometer manufacturing process, and enhanced power management technology. Two weeks after the initial launch AMD finally managed to supply us with a "Spider" system. Spider is a platform that the marketing dudes and dudettes from AMD came up with to offer you guys a complete new platform based on Radeon 3000 series cards, the new Phenom processors and the new 790 series of mainboard.

We received this test system last week on Friday, only to find out that the mainboard (Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DQ6) was having massive issues preventing us from installing Windows (I/O data corruption). Delays delays delays .. crazy. Luckily we always prepare ourselves for situations like that and we had a spare mainboard here in the lab from the good folks of Jetway. It's an engineering sample which got us back on track. It however limits us from testing CrossfireX, so on a later timeframe we'll have to look into that somehow. We have all the cards in-house.

For those interested; we already published an extensive Radeon 3850 & 3870 article; be sure to give that a read right here. With that being said, we'll focus on the Phenom X4 9700 quad core processor today. It's weird how the market can change right ? Two years ago .. Athlon 64 (FX) processors where the bomb. These processors where annihilating the Pentium 4 architecture in performance, AMD made truckloads of money of these processors and later on the X2 series.

Mid 2006 however Intel came back with a vengeance and release Core 2 Duo processors and from thereon the balance in the almighty CPU galaxy was gone. AMD is has been sailing really rough water. Core 2 is performing so well that AMD had to shift it's strategy completely. In the end-user, level we have all noticed the massive price-drops in the AMD64 X2 line of products. At AMD's side they had to ramp up their production with the new technology we are reviewing today. But, then in May, Intel came with Core 2 Quad entry level Q6600 processor. A Quad Core sub 275 USD processor, for which AMD had no answer. Until today, that is. Today we'll have a peek at AMD's Phenom 9700; a mainstream level native quad-core processor based on a completely new architecture.

Let's have a peek at the technology and from there on onwards to a meet and greet, benchmarks and our verdict.

Next page please.