# AMD Phenom - who's got one?

## audiodef

I'm thinkin of buying an AMD Phenom. The choice I have is between that and an Intel i7. I was wondering if anyone has a Phenom and what you think of it.

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## SunFox

Hello Audiodef,

                         I've got an Amd Phenom 9950 (x4). Fast, cheaper than intel..  :Very Happy: . I think that buying an Amd Phenom is  a good choice!  :Wink: 

                                                                                                                                      SunFox

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## audiodef

Thanks, SunFox.   :Smile: 

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## Kenji Miyamoto

I have a Phenom X4 9850.  I would've gotten the 9950, but Newegg wasn't selling it when I bought it between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Remember, -march=barcelona.

Since the Phenom II has come out, the original Phenom will be even cheaper, even though it theoretically won't be as fast or power-efficient.

Also, one of my other machines has a Phenom X4 9500.  GCC crashed like crazy until I upgraded to 4.3 on that machine, and I could barely manage to install Gentoo.

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## doctork

I've been using one of these as my main desktop system since last June.

 *Quote:*   

> AMD Phenom(tm) 9550 Quad-Core Processor

 

I haven't had any problems I could attribute to the Phenom -- a few caused by my own stupidity.  It's not as fast as competing Intel products, but certainly a lot cheaper and fast enough for anything I do.

--

doc

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## asturm

The Phenom II X4 and X3 ranging below € 200,- give their Intel competition a run for their money. They provide a decent performance advantage over their older Phenom colleagues at the same frequency. Also, AM3 CPUs plug happily into AM2+ Motherboards (after a short BIOS check at the mainboard vendor's site).

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## SunFox

Audiodef, 

              I think that it could be better wait, in order to buy an Amd Phenom II processor  :Smile: 

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## audiodef

Thanks for all the responses!   :Wink: 

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## MarioCorleone

you should probably go for the new Phenom II x2 940  

more about it here http://game.amd.com/us-en/unlock_phenomII.aspx

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## Solar Granulation

I have a Phenom II X4 940 Black.  So far it's everything I'd hoped for, so I give a strong recommendation.  If you shop around you can get a surprisingly good price.

I just wish I could use a march=k10 setting in GCC  :Wink: 

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## cyrillic

 *Solar Granulation wrote:*   

> I just wish I could use a march=k10 setting in GCC 

 

As Kenji Miyamoto mentioned, you can use -march=barcelona or -march=amdfam10 as long as you are running a recent (4.3+) version of gcc.

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## Solar Granulation

My word!  How'd I miss that?  I shall have to get 4.3!

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## johnisevil

I'm looking to upgrade my X2 4800+ to an X3 8650.  Now the question, is the addition of 1 core worth a loss of 200mhz? (The X2 4800+ being 2.5ghz, X3 8650 being 2.3ghz)

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## SunFox

Hello Johnisevil,

                         I think this model (X3 8650) loses 200Mhz (more or less), but it wins a core.It's true, but we can't apply this processor's clock speed and number of cores relation, for all processors. If I were you, I'd buy a X4 amd processor, or I'd wait in order to buy a Phenom II one;)

                                                                                                                        SunFox

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## BloodyIron

I'm having issues with the above mentioned march's.

I'm trying to install off of the amd64 2008.0 min disk, and I'm at the stage of updating portate.

It rejected the march, and so did gcc at first. I then reverted my march to "k8" and glibc and gcc compiled just fine. I then threw march barcelona on and recompiled gcc. Gcc completed, however all other items are still rejecting march barcelona and amdfam10.

What did you guys do to get this working?

```
x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-gcc -march=barcelona -O2 -pipe -D_GNU_SOURCE -DVERSION="0.1.19" -o paxelf.o -c paxelf.c

paxelf.c:1: error: bad value (barcelona) for -march= switch

paxelf.c:1: error: bad value (barcelona) for -mtune= switch

make: *** [paxelf.o] Error 1

```

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## doctork

I'm using march=native on gcc-4.3.3-r2.

--

doc

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## BloodyIron

 *doctork wrote:*   

> I'm using march=native on gcc-4.3.3-r2.
> 
> --
> 
> doc

 

What is the difference between this and the above marchs? don't you need to specify? So confused!

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## BloodyIron

My bad, I didnt have the right gcc version selected with gcc-config. The flag works now!

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## johnisevil

After much deliberation I've decided on the Phenom II X3 710.  I gain a core and 100mhz from what I'm using now (X2 4800+) so this isn't a huge upgrade but a decent one.

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## McLink

I have a Phenom 9850 X4. It's about 9-10 months old now, and it's still awesome as far as I'm concerned. With some taskset and ionice magic, you can keep a tonne of daemons running and still have a mad-responsive system. Unfortunately the speed of the hard disk is quite the bottleneck when doing high-speed quad multiprocessing. You might want to consider using noatime or relatime in your mount options to avoid it. Of course, if you have money to burn, you might want to consider an SSD.

So basically, the Phenom is awesome - so awesome, in fact, that its speed tends to get quenched by slower storage and even memory components.

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## raddaqii

I got a Phenom II X3 720 BE, for about 113 Euro... and finally upgraded from my ageing sempron 754 and via chipset from around 2004 to AM3. ^^

...but I failed to compile my own kernel to match the mainboard specs, even with lspci -nnv and trying several times. I then took the minimal install cd and copied the kernel config.  :? 

anyhow, it feels like its twenty times faster, and Zope development is really fun again!

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## cach0rr0

 *raddaqii wrote:*   

> I got a Phenom II X3 720 BE, for about 113 Euro... and finally upgraded from my ageing sempron 754 and via chipset from around 2004 to AM3. ^^
> 
> ...but I failed to compile my own kernel to match the mainboard specs, even with lspci -nnv and trying several times. I then took the minimal install cd and copied the kernel config.  
> 
> anyhow, it feels like its twenty times faster, and Zope development is really fun again!

 

Once you get ready to do another kernel build, post back and let some of us have a crack at it  :Smile: 

BTW: I have a Phenom 9950, for anyone that cares. Tis running in my server, quickest build ever - compile time was nothing.

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## energyman76b

I got a Phenom II X4 955 on monday, replacing my aging X2 6000.

Both have identical TDP - but the Phenom ist cooler thanks to better powermanangment. I am very satisfied.

http://techgage.com/article/amd_phenom_ii_x4_955_black_edition/4

doesn't look that bad ....

the only bad thing, tv made problems - powermanagment was too good. I had either put one burnMMX instance into background or deactivate advanded halt state or tv picture would be choppy - I deavtivated c1e - and cpu is not hotter than before.

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## energyman76b

 *johnisevil wrote:*   

> After much deliberation I've decided on the Phenom II X3 710.  I gain a core and 100mhz from what I'm using now (X2 4800+) so this isn't a huge upgrade but a decent one.

 

the new phenom cores are 10-20% faster at the same clock speed (a 2700mhz x2 kuma is faster than a 3000mhz x2 windsor).

so you will get a nice boost - but 4 cores would be better of course  :Wink: 

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## cach0rr0

I need to stop paying attention to other people's hardware

It's only been 6 months or so since I bought this 9950 X4 black rig. Now I am already so far behind after just a few months. 

I can't afford to try and keep up ;x

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## mikkoc

What processor family should I choose for a phenom X4 955 in the kernel config?

I suppose "Opteron/Athlon64/Hammer/K8 MK8"?

Are there any other specific options I should enable/disable in the kernel?

thanks

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## energyman76b

here is my config:

http://omploader.org/vMjY5Yw

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## mikkoc

Does anyone know why support for K10 thermal sensor isn't in the kernel yet? The patch has been around for more than a year now   :Confused: 

http://lists.lm-sensors.org/pipermail/lm-sensors/2008-October/024308.html

http://alt.nntp2http.com/os/linux/2008/08/3e7de045c54f5cd5b7e563330597ab79.html

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## saellaven

 *mikkoc wrote:*   

> Does anyone know why support for K10 thermal sensor isn't in the kernel yet? The patch has been around for more than a year now  
> 
> http://lists.lm-sensors.org/pipermail/lm-sensors/2008-October/024308.html
> 
> http://alt.nntp2http.com/os/linux/2008/08/3e7de045c54f5cd5b7e563330597ab79.html

 

It's being sent around to the appropriate people for review right now. It came up on the lkml this week.

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## Crimjob

9850 Black and loving it

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