AMD is BACK with a Vengence!

I am so delighted to see that AMD has finally come up with a serious competitor CPU- The Phenom II X4. I am saying this is because with the Phenom II, it can achieve the same level of performance/watt as the Intel Q6600. As we know, the Q6600 is the idel CPU for most of the people who wants to have a taste on quadcore. No doubt that the AMD Phenom X4 is good but it is not as good as the Q6600. In fact, the original X4 could not be on par with the Q6600. I've build myself a Q6600 rig too, way back in March 2008. It is still running cool at around 36c in a normal room. If I were to run the cpu under stress, the temperature would hardly move up pass 43c. That is if you don't overclock.

Some people they will tend to overclock their cpu. Given the amount of flexibility which the Q6600 can take, one can easily overclock up to 3.0ghz without any problems. Well, the problem would start when you try to overclock past 3.6ghz. It is recommended that if you overlock your Q6600, it is best to have stable memory and a decent graphics card and a decent cooler. Besides that, you would need to tweak the BIOS at a stepping at a time. Never shoot up to 3.6ghz from stock speed of 2.4ghz. It will most probably crash your system. I did manage to overclock my rig to 3.0ghz without changing anything on the BIOS except for the voltage incrase to 1.4 and the PCI speed should be 100mhz. That is all I did. Well, I only overclock it for a few hours before going back to stock speed. I don't really like to overclock the cpu. It will be best if I buy a better cpu, rather than to push the mobo to the extreme. In overclocking, you will see that your cpu temperature will rise, so does the amount of dust in your rig.You've been warned!

Coming back to the AMD Phenom II X4, it was stated here that they will release a 3.6ghz version! That is absolutely wonderful! Although the Phenom II X4 is no match for the Intel i7 Core cpu, nevertheless, the Phenom II X4 is cheaper and is socket AM2 compatible (with updated BIOS will do just fine). Well, looking at the specifications of the new AMD Phenom II X4 cpu, I am prety impressed!!! I think the next rig which I am going to build will be based on the AMD cpu. I will have a look as I am still very much in love with my Q6600. It is quiet and very powerful. What can you say when you have 8GB of Geil DDR2-800 Quad channel Dragon series memory and a Nvidia 9800 GTX+ graphics card paired up with an Intel Q6600 and an Artic Cooling Freezer Pro 7 cpu cooler? It is a beast with immense cooling power! It is excellent! Couple with Windows 7 beta build 7000, it is a fantastic job though...