As others have already posted, my two biggest questions are:

Why wasn't the overclocked 4200+ benchmarked against a stock 4800+?

Why wasn't a 4400+ used instead of a 4200+? It has double the cache and is only slightly more expensive.

Another great review from the Boss

What paper launch, the x2s have been in newegg for a week

paper launches sucks!
AMD have no cpus

#45 Wesley:- "Specializing in certain review areas, as we do at AnandTech, makes you a lot less stupid and easily duped than you might imagine"


a very nicely veiled jab there Wesley. Hope the recepients have skulls thin enough for it to trickle in!! Kudos!

wtf is up with these bitchy bitches bitching about the 'integrity' of AT these days?

is it the replacement for the 'Soviet Russia.." cliche ???

very nice review, im very happy that you tested this cpu and overclocked it. thanks.

Sheesh, I thought we'd put Anandtech's integrity to bed by now? I have no concerns.

Wesley - I hope you can get a 4400+ as I am very curious to see what the results look like. The small price bump over the 4200+ makes it pretty appealing, especially if it can OC as well and provides a but of a performance bump.

I too would LOVE to see some 1gb vs 2gb RAM comparisons with various configurations.

#42 & #35 - To bring the news to you first, our ONLY choice is manufacturer-supplied samples. When we test there is usually nothing available in the retail channel.

In this case we had one one Retail 4200+ and one manufacturer-supplied 4200+. They performed within 5MHz of each other in overclocking, which is equal performance. Our performance with both processors is lower than sites that publish a screen capture of an OC speed and don't run any benches, so we stand by our results on air cooling.

The "Conspiracy" theory sounds good, and is usually spouted by the manufacturers who didn't do well in a roundup. In a truly competitive world like computer components there is no point to providing "cherry" parts to reviewers. If people buy a product due to a review that shows x performance and their part won't do the same they RMA the part. RMA's cost manufacturers lots of money. A high RMA rate will quickly kill any profits on a product.

Even memory - a business based on binning or hand-picking of parts for performance - has settled down on cherry parts. Manufacturers who tried that got burned on RMAs and came back the second time with representative parts.

There is always variation in overclocking results, but huge variation from reported results are someone who doesn't know how to overclock, a change in parts used (which is why overclockers are big on production weeks), or a change in binning (selection criteria). Specializing in certain review areas, as we do at AnandTech, makes you a lot less stupid and easily duped than you might imagine.

*adding*

here is the 3g on air
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php...