AMD 'Spider' platform

BANGALORE, INDIA: Every now and then you come across platform, graphics cards, motherboards, etc, dishing out that bit extra to keep the gaming fraternity happy and excited. This implicates that the gaming fraternity is no longer a sub-duded market, it's growing and it's serious business.

With Quad Core's entry into the desktop market, it made life even more enthralling for gamers as now they have not only strong GPUs but also the power of Quad Core CPUs to take gaming more close to reality and to add more life to it.

Last month we reviewed the latest Desktop Quad Core Offering from both Intel and AMD (Clash of the Titans)and we mentioned that this month we would be coming up with a review of Spider platform. AMD was slightly late in launching their Phenom processor but has won a small battle against NVIDIA and Intel by launching the first DirectX 10.1 supported card and Gaming Platform respectively.

AMD Spider is a combination of three components: an AMD Phenom Quad Core Processor 9600 or 9500, AMD series 7 chipset, and RV670 Chip that forms the heart of HD 3800 Series card. We discussed extensively about AMD Phenom 9600 processor in the last issue, so this time we will focus mainly on the new chipset and the latest graphics card from AMD.

The 7-series chipset includes three chipsets, among which 770 chipset is the most basic one, followed by 790X and 790FX. The 770 chipset is mainly targeted at consumers who are on the look out for latest technology. Whereas the 770X mainly targets the intense gamers and HD power users, the 790FX is for those gaming geeks who love over-clocking and are crazy about mindboggling fps. All of them have support for HyperTransport 3.0 technology which enhances the CPU communication bandwidth to graphics.

It also has support for PCI Express 2.0 which almost doubles the graphics bandwidth over earlier version of PCI Express. The AMD RAIDXpert allows you to easily configure your RAID setup from remote location to personalize your media for extra performance or enhanced reliability. And the best part of the 7-series is it's designed to ensure that more power is available for other components when and if required. The high-end chips also have support for Auto Xpress which allows performance boost by automatically activating AMD/ATI component to deliver better CPU, GPU, and system performance.

The GPU-Plex technology enables to scale twin-engine technology all on a single chip enhance enabling flexible configuration for multiple graphics card on a single x16 link. ATI CrossFireX technology helps you to attain that much extra in terms of graphics performance. Overall the 7-series chipset has all that is required by the Quad core to give it enthralling gaming performance.

Coming to the 3800 series graphics cards, ATI was the first to come up with cards which support DirectX 10.1, the next gen of DirectX. The 3800 series is mainly for serious gamers and comes with many added features. There are mainly two cards that feature in this range: HD3850 and HD3750X2 (review on HD3850 in this issue).

For testing we chose a MSI K9A2 Platinum Motherboard with 1 GB Crossair RAM, 120 GB Seagate HDD, Sony DVD ROM, ATI 790X chipset, ATI Radeon HD3850 graphics card, and

Windows XP.

Performance results

Coming to performance, it scored 10943 in 3D Mark06 which is pretty good score when compared to that we got from 2900 series card and Dual Core processor. Surely we have seen even better performance from NVIDIA 8800GTX but we must not forget that 3850 is not the ultimate card from ATI (they have 3870X2 to compete with the likes of 8800GTX). Coming to the gaming tests: in Company of Heroes it gave an average of 103 fps which is good, though we expected slightly better performance, as even with an 8800GT card from NVDIA we managed to get 120 plus fps. Now the big daddy of gaming: in Crysis it could manage an average score of 26 fps which is good and surely would be even higher with HD3870X2 card.

In Unreal Tournament3 it managed an average of 55.3 fps which is on the higher side implicating that this platform is all ready for high-end gaming. In SisSoft Sandra Processor Multimedia test, it gave 87522 iit/s in Multimedia int which is very high compared to what we get from dual core. In fact in SisSoft Sandra ALU Power Performance its score of 11774MIPS proves that it is very power efficient.

We tried checking how good is it with multitasking and hence stressed it with Video decoder app along with Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Maya 7, all running together. The system showed no sign of instability and performed well, with none of the core being utilized even up to 60%. We tried running Crysis in tandem with Photoshop CS2 and Office PowerPoint and Excel, still the processor weren't stressed to their optimum level, which goes to show that it's ready for even greater challenge and more demanding application.

Overall this platform will be a good for gaming enthusiasts though it would be interesting to see what will be AMD's next step as Intel has already come up with their gaming platform called 'Skulltrail' which is boosted by two Quad Core processors running in tandem. Imagine after getting such high performance from a single Quad Core Processor, what it would be like from two of them along with a top end gaming card, gaming at its best. But we still believe this Spider platform will have its own market simply because of the price point.

Bottomline: Owing to its reasonable price, this Spider will spread its web around most gaming geeks.