New AMD hardware

K9A2 Platinum 790FX AM2+ ATX Motherboard

Radeon HD 3870 512MB GDDR4 PCIe Graphics Card

AMD® Boxed Phenom X4 Quad-Core Black Edition Processor 9850

XMS2 2GB PC-8500 DDR2 Memory Kit

I have to say that this is one sweet system. I know people have bench-marked the Spider platform at less than the Intel Core2 Duo. I don’t really care for supporting Intel. That is a personal opinion, and I will bash Intel later for “cheating” to get into the Quad Core market. Intel thinks that they were first, but AMD has 4 single cores, and not two dual cores fused together.

I feel that Intel’s Core2 Duo was built for the “right now” and not for the future. AMD built a Quad Core that, I would say, 80% of the software doesn’t support. What do I mean? Multi-threading. I noticed that when using apt-get, in Ubuntu 8.04, to build the dependencies for WINE that during the install one core would max at out 100% while the other 3 cores just cruised along. Just about the time that one core would drop to 0% another one to max out to 100%. This means that for each lib that was installed, apt-get was only riding on one core, thus not multi-threading.

I have yet to do any testing in Microsoft Windows. Although I have installed Microsoft Windows XP, I will still need to do some test and installs to see how it goes with the Phenom. If my hunch is correct, XP will function as a 2.5GHz 80% of the time. Maxing out 1 core while the others run other processes. We shale see.

As for the ATI RadeonHD 3870. The processor speed is at 800MHz. I have seen some of the same cards boast 851MHz, but I have not tried to over clock the GPU yet, and I may not ever. From what I can tell the few minutes I played GuildWars, the responce time on graphics is great. Everything was turned up as high as it would go. I’m looking forward to getting some other game time in and seeing how the system preforms.