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AMD Phenom II listings begin to appear, priced at sub-£200

by Parm Mann on 1 December 2008, 12:33

Tags: Phenom X4, AMD (NYSE:AMD)

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HEXUS' very own Mr Sandhu was watching AMD's representatives run a cherry-picked 45nm Phenom II CPU at near-4GHz with basic air-cooling at a tech day in Texas last week.

It takes some doing to send Sandhu away impressed, but he concluded that "should AMD be able to productise the all-new Phenom mkII at, say, 3GHz+ at launch, with promise of higher frequencies and DDR3 support to come, along with a street price of around £200, then Intel may not have it all its own way".

Today, a pair of those Phenom II processors have appeared on the pages of UK-based etailer MoreComputers.com. According to its product listings, Phenom II will arrive in two models - a 2.8GHz Phenom II 920 and a 3.0GHz Phenom II 940 Black Edition, priced at £190.65 and £231.32, respectively.

The 920 and 940 nomenclature may seem strangely familiar, but the quad-core Phenom II won't be challenging Intel's Core i7 in the performance stakes, we feel. Instead, it'll attempt to put AMD back in the desktop race with a set of affordable mid-range chips that should at the very least challenge Intel's ageing Core 2 range.

There may still be no win in sight for AMD, though. Should Phenom II pose a threat, we'd expect Intel to respond with a slight swipe at its Core 2 pricing. Either way, the competition should result in well-priced mid-range processors for the masses.

Readers should also be aware that MoreComputers' prices are anything but definitive, and that the etailer doesn't offer any pre-sales or post-sales technical support whatsoever. Although the listings appear to be about right in our estimation, official pricing and availability won't be known until AMD lets it slip.



HEXUS Forums :: 12 Comments

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So they've priced the Black Edition at the same level as the i7 920, so it's still a case of top level AMD vs entry Intel, but it'll cost you somewhere between £100 and £300 less to go AMD purely because it uses older motherboards and RAM…

I think they might have something here, it's going to be interesting to see the launch overclocking results…
When will these be available?
January 8th according to the rumour mill
Main
So they've priced the Black Edition at the same level as the i7 920, so it's still a case of top level AMD vs entry Intel, but it'll cost you somewhere between £100 and £300 less to go AMD purely because it uses older motherboards and RAM…

I think they might have something here, it's going to be interesting to see the launch overclocking results…

It might cost you less but I'll wager the performance would be worse. You could get probably get the Core 2 Quad alternative and save the same amount of money but have more performance than a Phenom. And of course the long term TCO is a factor, if the Phenom still uses more power then over a year that can add to the cost differential (more important maybe in a business many PCs than at home).

Of course we need reviews to see… and as ever AMDs light in the dark is integrated graphics chipsets, but even that is dimming thanks for Nvidia's 9400 for Core 2.
I'll wait for the benchmarks, I was planning to upgrade to a Core i7 but the cost of an x58 mobo is putting it over budget at the moment. I hadn't anticipated £200+.