Wonder if anyone had any feedback or advice for an AMD workstation system in terms of specification. I've got bad RSI and I don't have a lot of cash.  I've been running an AMD single core Athlon 3200+  running at 2.2 GHz. at 1.5 MB of RAM.

I use window XP and are very careful to keep the resources as light as possible, I also use Dragon NaturallySpeaking for navigating Internet.  Switching from one tab to another there is about a two second delay and it starts to choke when there are more than 20 tabs open.

I recently bought second-hand a dual core version of my Athlon 3200 running at the same clock speed for £20.  Ill be the first time I've owned a dual core, but I'm not feeling that excited about the performance boost if any. but this is the economy option


I be looking at the AMD Phenom 2 550be dual core processor, it's got 6 MB of L3 cache. and in many of the benchmarks it seems to be biting the heels of the e8400 from Intel.  There is no doubt in my mind that the Intel is a superior chip but the phenon is £75 and the Intel is about £110.  

The thing is I don't really understand the Intel motherboards like I do the AMD all I know is that I've heard the AMD motherboards are cheaper for what you get.  Be hoping to use a board with integrated graphics using the new 85 graphic chipset.

Also I'm concerned that the E8400 is a bit older technology and doesn't support virtualisation in Windows 7 which I like the idea of when I can afford it.

I'm very interested in good power consumption is well, I've been interested by the new AMD Athlon II range as well as the Phenom 2 550be  .  But it's very hard to get feedback about how these chips perform with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.  

I've learnt more about Intel and the perfect setup and hardware on these forums than anywhere else.  But the price range is just way out of my budget.  but I still require powerful performance and complete control of my computer with DNS.  Would appreciate your help to find a way to achieve this.

I've been using DNS 10.1 with an AMD workstation for a long while, in xp-64 and now Vista-64, and it works fine. It is a few generations old (a 2 dual core Opteron 290 2.8 GHz CPUs with less cache than the new AMDs as well as slower DDR memory) but it runs well. My bet is that the new AMD CPUs will work great.

MS 

Hi Matthew, thanks for  sharing your thoughts, you probably said many times on the forum but what rig are you using at the moment.?

 

If anyone else had any thoughts and experiences of AMD processors I would love to hear them.

At work the one I described (w7, 2 dual core amd opteron 290s, 8GB RAM). At home I use a macbook pro (intel 2.4 GHz core 2 duo, 4 GB RAM) and vmware fusion 3 (running an xp-64 VM given 1 core and 1GB RAM).