CPU/Mobo Athlon II or Phenom II

D

dyna

Disciple
I am planning to make an AMD based system. Can someone suggest the adv/disadv of taking an Athlon II vs Phenom II based system. I find that Athlon II is cheaper. What is given by Phenom II for the extra price.

My requirements:
I dont do lot of gaming. My typical usage is 50% multimedia. 30% normal usage (office, internet, etc). 20% programming using virtual computer.

I am willing to compromise on speed. I am not willing to compromise on feature set... For example, I am not willing to loose some feature like SSE4a or hardware virtualisation.

Can someone suggest what do i loose out if I choose athlon II over Phenom II.
 
Phenom II are typically gaming/high performance processors. If your purpose is general office work/programming you should stick to the Athlon IIs and save cash, you will not be missing much.
 
g33kgod: I think u missed to hyperlink.

Infected: Some applications check for instructions like SSE2/3, if the CPU doesnt support, they dont run or install. (soon the check may become sse4,...). Similarly win7 wont run virtual XP mode if there is no h/w virtualisation (recently they removed this restriction).

I want to be able to use applications without such restrictions, but I dont mind being a little slow. So I dont bother about L3 cache.

Bobby, Latino: Thanks for your inputs. But do u know what feature set Phenom has which Athlon doesnt have?

Desecrator: Multimedia usage includes HD viewing mostly and some HD encoding and very little video editing. I dont really mind encoding taking 1 hour, instead of 40 minutes. But I should be able to do. ( Some multimedia apps just refused to install or run in my old athlon XP because of SSExx support).
 
the athlon II x4 is identical to the phenom II x4 except the l3 cache...virtulization, sse4 etc, everythings the same.
why not just open the amd website for confirmation?
 
exactly. all the instruction sets which are of any real world significance are supported by ATHLON-II.
so do not worry about the lack of features.
Again, the real-world application of cache is debatable, and not a sure shot marker of performance.
Depends on the applications too.eg. gta4 runs much better on athlon ii 435 than on the phenom ii 550/555.(because of the extra core on the athlon) here, the phenom has more cache, but useless.
 
The Athlon II and Phenom II are based on the same K10 micro architecture. So the feature set they support are the same. I acknowledge my mistake in the earlier post in this thread.

The Athlon II lacks the L3 cache which the Phenom II has and AMD compensates for the lack of L3 cache by increasing the L2 cache to 1MB. The Phenom II L2 is only 512KB. The advantages of the L3 cache is prominent in office applications and gaming. Computational tasks like encoding will not benefit from L3 cache.

The Athlon II is a native dual core processor with 2 MB L2. There is nothing to unlock and it is multiplier locked (somebody please confirm this). The Phenom II is a native quad core processor which has it's two cores disabled. If you are lucky, they can be enabled in a motherboard with 78x/790 chipsets. The Phenom II are multiplier unlocked so they can be easily overclocked.

You can review your requirements based on the above information and make the appropriate choice.

Bobby
 
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