Originally posted by sammorris:

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Something like a Corsair VX 450W. It's a much better quality unit than the Antec - 450W is ample.

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Originally posted by sammorris:

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Deals come and go, they always do, but the RRP for Windows OSes has always been well over $100.

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Originally posted by sammorris:

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Little performance chart here to hopefully lay out the boundaries between today's current mid and high-end quad core CPUs.

Games performance
i7 920: 100.0%
i5 750: 100.1%
Q9550: 92.5%
X4 965BE: 95.5%
X4 955BE: 91.0%
X4 940: 86.5%

Software performance
i7 920: 100.0%
i5 750: 101.1%
Q9550: 86.0%
X4 965BE: 87.9%
X4 955BE: 84.6%
X4 940: 81.1%

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Originally posted by sammorris:

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Indeed, the source is TheTechReport's CPU charts. All the results are tabulated, and I will happily upload a snapshot of the spreadsheet if you wish.
I have weighted each game or application in such a manner that if multiple tests are carried out per application (for example, a single-threaded and multi-threaded version, or two different benchmark runs) each score only takes a 50% weighting.
For games, I have underweighted tests that exceed 100fps for the fastest CPU as they are less critical on CPU performance (e.g. where the fastest CPU tested scores 200fps, I would divide the weighting by 2).
Other than that, it's simply a case of the fastest CPU getting 100%, the slower ones getting however close they get. The only other thing to note is that tests that are unlikely to be used in the real world, or be CPU-limited in the real world (such as archive decompression or artificial benchmarks) have also been half-weighted. This seems fair to me. I have not biased the weighting of any tests that show an advantage to either side, for obvious reasons.
Since the Phenom II X4 940 is not included in the tests I have extrapolated the results from the difference between the 955BE and 965BE chips. Due to the even spacing between the clock speeds, and the AM3 advantages of the 955/965 compared to the 940, this means the 940 is actually scoring slightly higher than it would in the real world. How much so, however, is difficult to measure, so I didn't try to weight it back.
Expecting the response that "for video usage the Phenoms would score better" I have deliberately isolated game tests and software tests - what you see is what you get, on average, between 3D Modelling, Protein folding, MP3 and video encoding, the X4 940 works out at 81% of an i7 920 or i5 750, i.e. it is 20.0% slower, or conversely, an i5 750 is 24.7% faster.

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Originally posted by sammorris:

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Actually I think I do remember you commenting on it, but I'm not sure where or what was said.

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Originally posted by sammorris:

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Well, like for like CPUs you can. Fortunately the X4 620 and 940, other than having different amounts of cache, are very similar. You couldn't really do it for fixed multiplier CPUs like Core 2 Quads as the memory speeds wouldn't match up properly.

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Originally posted by sammorris:

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I still wouldn't trust it to be honest, I would rather try and extrapolate the clock speeds. The Toms method is ideal for AMDs, but cross-platform, it has limitations.

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Originally posted by Gneiss1:

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Though not in the forum's title, I see this forum is for building machines optimized for video games.

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