and I was wondering if anyone had any gotchas or glowing reports with the Phenom II X6. The current plans for the new workstation box is: Gigabyte GA-890XA-UD3-RT ATX mobo G-Skill 2x4gb DDR3 ram (ultimately going to have 16 gigs ram) AMD Phenom II X6 1075T (and most likely will be replacing the factory heatsink with a larger, copper heatpipe unit). E-Mu 1616M audio card and breakout box. Existing 1.5tbytes of secondary hard drives (the current Phenom II X4 65watt board, 8 gigs DDR-2 and 750 gig boot drive will be moved in toto to my main system, replacing the Athlon II X2 I currently have). Probably Win 7 Pro as the OS (unless I find some pressing reason for Ultimate). And yes, the difference is worth the hassle. On a Vue Infinite 9 300 frame test animation, the current CG box was doing 3.5 minutes a frame average, while the main box was doing 22.3 min average. After getting the office squared away, the plan is to start upgrading the renderboxes in the rack downstairs so that I can take advantage of the gigabit network I'm building into the house, moving away from the old Athlon socket 939, which you can no longer get anything for (AM3 boards are cheap again, and those let you start with the new Athlon II's and move over to the Phenom II as finances or sales permit). Plus you can get the Athlon II X4's in 65 and 85 watt flavors, to save on heat and power bill shock. Haven't decided on video card upgrades, if any. As I go through this, anything I find will be passed on.....

Hi Dale.

Your version of the Phenom was just released here a couple days ago. I went to purchase one, but Fry's had only ordered 2 or 3, and I was too late. Doubtful if very many people have much experience with it yet.

I ALWAYS preffer to stick with stuff that's been out about 6 months to 1 year, at least.
From long experience, there's usually much less bugs and issues that way, and you get to read folks personal reviews on Ebuyer etc :)

I stick with Intel 'cause their stuff works, even if they are goat-scroggling rip-off artists :p
But competition keeps 'em keen so hey I need folk buying AMD, too ;)

any word on the stability of the 4gig RAM chips, folks?

Hmmm....

Looks like I get to benchmark things! Wheee!

I'm not too worried about the X6's 'newness'. AMD hit gold with the design on the Athlon/Phenom processors, as it scales beautifully (still). It's literally just adding 2 more processors to the die, along with the needed interconnects and crossbar controller. The DDR3 memory controller has been out long enough for it to prove stable. And enough chips have been run on the 45nm process for any gremlins to have fallen out there

Since you still have the 905e version, maybe we could run a similar scene and compare times, Pam (as I don't know if I'm patient enough to do so on one, then build and configure and beat into submission and do so on the new one. You know the old saying about a boy and his toys....). The Gigabyte board I have in the old system is technically capable of running an X6 with a BIOS flash, but I've found that to be very hit and miss, a lot seeming to depend on the actual mobo's quality.

And gee silver, that's =just= what I say about AMD....at least regarding the fact the they work, and work well. :P And that La Intella are rip off artists...... >:)= There may be more =room= for AMD based systems to have issues, as they don't follow 'the pack', but a little care in software loading order has so far tamed all the beasts people keep putting off on AMD design (and reinforces my assertion that the vast majority of issues users have are pebcak. Some are definitely hardware; but those can be diagnosed and repaired. Configuration is the demon bitch from hell). That and simply refusing to load 'social applications' on the now separate CG box. 

Amazing the amount of issues one doesn't have without those.....

What little I've heard seems to follow previous patterns; those using the 4gig DDR3 sticks seem to have no problems if they use them in an out of the box environment. The bitching starts and goes up the more one overclocks. Or the ever present "I got 4 gigs in there, dude! WHY won't my XP use it!!!" Heat does seem to be a touchier subject, as the chips draw more power, so a bad airflow layout could allow them to overheat to instability. We shall see....

Hey James - where's your spirit of adventure!

Hi Dale.

I have the slightly older six-core on a ASUS Crosshair Formula III mobo, with six GB of DDR3 highest grade RAM. Will be unavialble for a couple of days, but would be willing to share some benchmarking data with you at the end of the week. If you like.

Have Vue 8.5 and 9 installed, but not quite the latest download of Vue 9. And no internet connection at that machine. And no power issues for me, I think. I'm a big fan of having a LOT of steady-stable power available for my systems.

Want to suggest a test scene?

Hmm.

It may take me a little longer than a week to do what I plan to do. I need to get a new 700+ watt power supply, as the one currently in my main box won't support the Phenom II, connector wise at least (and it's a good excuse to get all my office boxes onto 'green' power supplies).  And if I do that, I might as well go ahead and upgrade the DVD on the main to a bluray burner, and get the other 8 gigs of DDR3 for the CG box.

I'll take a look at the canned scenes, and see which ones really make a system work.

Ha! "Spirit of adventure" is for those with money and health! ;)

and yeah if you get a system buil to your spec with good stuff, and, importantly, keep it ONLY for art stuff, you usually have far less issues :)

Actually, I've only just started to peel my CG stuff off onto a separate box, and that was more due to the insane amount of stuff I have spread over 6 hard drives in my main box, and being smart enough to not try a network render while surfing the net....which kinda put a crimp in the work, as that would tie up the system for hours. And =I= usually prefer to wait that 6 months to a year myself, and still do on things like hard drive tech and video tech. Hell, if it wasn't for the graphics stuff, I would still be tooling along with the Athlon 64 X2 I currently have in my main system.

    ......although I would be casting longing looks upwards after seeing some of the stuff about Skyrim in Game Informer, and digging into what Havok Behavior does.... 8D