Last week I received an AMD Spider system which has a quad-core Phenom 9700 2.4GHz processor and a 256MB ATI Radeon HD 3850 graphics card. Both the processor and graphics card are samples, with the video card having a sticker that reads “Non-Qualifications Sample” slapped on it.
When AMD first introduced me to Phenom over a year ago, they made comments such as “We don’t duct tape our cores together” and “We will deliver a processor that will eliminate the hour glass”. I took those statements with a grain of salt, and early benchmarks made everyone wonder if AMD was going to pull through. I have come to realize over the past week that while the hour glass hasn’t disappeared, I do see it a lot less. There is a lot of room for improvement but after all I just have an engineering sample in this machine the final version will most likely be better.
I believe that the Spider Platform was designed with Vista in mind; I say that because I have never seen Vista as fast as it is on the system AMD sent me. Vista boots up within 20 to 30 seconds, and restarts in about 50 seconds (click here to watch a video). I see the little Vista logo and straight to my desktop and everything is loaded quickly. A lot of people have also complained about Vista taking a long time to shut down, but not the case with this system. Everything is instant; and for those of you who installed Windows Vista SP1 on your machines and it took hours, it only took 30 minutes here even with the several reboots.
For the past week I have used the system extensively, I have updated it to Vista SP1 RC, I installed Office 2007 with SP1 on it. I also installed games like Crysis, Flight Simulator X with Expansion Pack, The Sims 2, Stranglehold, and Roller Coaster Tycoon 3. Yes, I am a Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 addict.
Opening Word, Outlook, or any office program did so without a hint of the splash screen and no wait for the program to fully load. Even a large excel file (22MB) loaded in seconds, which impressed me a lot as it takes about 3 minutes for it to open up completely on my day to day system.
Starting games and loading them was quick, and no long waits for a game to load. Crysis loaded so fast that I didn’t even have a chance to time it. The same was with the other games I installed. With DX10 you are just blown away even more and we have to give credit to the ATI Radeon 3850 HD card inside for delivering gorgeous graphics.
I kind of miss all the splash screens and loading messages for programs and games, but then again that’s not a bad thing.
Knowing that this is the first quad core system I have tested, I wanted to compare it to another quad core system, so I enlisted the help of a friend who owns an Intel quad-core system. His system has similar specs to the system AMD sent with the exception of memory, which he lacked 1GB. We installed another 1GB to make them equal and I played on the system for a day. I can honestly say the AMD system was comparable to the Intel system; Intel’s was a bit faster as Vista loaded in 15 to 20 seconds. When it came to applications and games, I honestly couldn’t see a difference in load times and performance. This made me think of something else AMD has been trying to get across to people for the past year or so. When they said “Ignore benchmarks judge the system on how it performs”, I thought the AMD Spider platform performed superbly. No complaints here.
Another thing worth mentioning is when you installed a program on this system, the program installed quickly. Even programs that are known for taking ages to install such as America Online, Adobe Photoshop, and Microsoft Office.
The System AMD sent me has a Windows Experience Index of 5.9. I tried to run a PCMark Vantage to run a benchmark but I had issues running the test (Software related).
AMD also provides some software called AMD OverDrive which they will soon make available. AMD OverDrive is currently being tested and in the beta stage. The software will allow users to easily overclock their system. I did not test the software fully as many of the features do not work yet but the features that did work, helped improved the systems performance.
Overall the Spider Platform is everything AMD said it would be. Although I was a little disappointed with the benchmarks I had seen, and problems I had heard about, after trying out the system for a little over a week I can honestly say it’s fantastic. For the price that these systems will sell for, it is a bargain as well.
You should expect to see Spider Platform Systems early next year! I recommend you wait to get one if you are in the market for a new powerful gaming machine.
Those of you interested in what temps the machine has check the image below.
Originally Posted December 16th 2007.
Comments: (2)
on Thu, Mar 13th, 2008 at 09:19 PM
Why the Repost? A lot of people searching for this and not finding it because its on the old HWG not new.
on Wed, May 28th, 2008 at 02:14 AM
It’s been painful to watch AMD be shafted by Intel and nVidia recently, hopefully they’ll make a comeback with this. It looks like a new approach to gaming platforms, and those are usually the most successful.
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