KAR120C's Full Review: AMD Phenom II X2 550, 3.1GHz (HDZ550WFGIBOX) Retai...
My aging Shuttle XPC was unable to handle large Powerpoint to Flash coversion. My Shuttle was running an overclocked single core AMD XP CPU running at 2.1 GHz. The coversion of 30 minute video to Flash took about 15 to 20 minutes which was just too long. As Shuttle does not offer motherboard upgrades, I opted to surrender the beloved XPC form factor in lue of a more standard microATX form factor. As cost is always an issue for me, I did some research on how much CPU I really needed. It appeared that a dual core chip would suit my needs and that to my luck, AMD had just released the Phenom II 550. The 550 an "unlocked" CPU which can be overclocked. Another possibly unintended plus of the 550 is the abilty to "unlock" two additional cores on the CPU; effectively allowing it to perform as a quad core CPU. With a default clock speed of 3.1 on its dual cores and a price of about 100 bucks, this was a pretty easy decision for my new 400 dollar PC.
The new parts I used for my new (June 2009) PC were: Lian Li PC-V351B mini tower Corsair 400W power sully 4 GB DDR2 Kingston RAM Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-US2H THERMALTAKE cl-p0391 ruby orb CPU fan AMD Phenom 550 CPU
Theese were ordered from Mwave who test the mobo, RAM and CPU prior to shipping at no charge. Very nice...thank you MWave.
I used my WD Velocirator hard drive and 2 WD hard drives for data. I was unable to use my aging AGP video card as the new mobo has no AGP slot. (for now I am using the on board video which is about on a par with the old AGP card.)
The Phenom II 550 comes with a stock CPU cooler. I did not know this when I ordered the chip. I had read that AMD was not including a stock cooler with its unlocked chips so I ordered the large Ruby Orb fan. If you don't plan on overclocking the chip, the stock fan will be fine. First boot with the 550 and its stock fan was flawless. After getting my Windows XP installation updated with the new mobo drivers and reactivating Windows with Microsoft I ran CPUZ and found that the chip was running at 3.1GHz on 2 cores. I then rebooted to the bios and increased the clock multiplier to 18.5x and ran CPUZ and found that the CPU was now running at 3.8GHz on 2 cores. Very easy to overclock this chip indeed!
I soon realized that in order to attempt to unlock the two additional cores of the 550, the mobo and bios must offer Advanced Clock Calibration within the bios. Gigabyte mobo I purchased sadly doesn't have this setting so I was unable to try unlocking the additional 2 cores. As I really don't think I need the addition on the 3rd and 4th cores, I don't think I will cry too much over this. There are a few more expensice MicroATX board which apparently do offer the features needed to unlock the additional cores.
I installed the Ruby Ord CPU fan and kept the 550 set to 3.8 GHz. I then attempted the Powerpoint to Flash conversion procedure and found that the system restarted at about 5 minutes into the conversion. I backed the multiplier down to 18x and with the chip running at 3.62GHz the conversion ran smoothly in about 4 minutes. This is a nice speed improvement for such heavy calculation based operations! The PC has been up and stable at this speed for about 10 days and I have performed the conversion process (Powerpoint to Presenter) about 50 times with no problems. The rig is solid stable at 3.6GHz. I don't see much reason to tweak the system for any additional spped gains as it is running rock steady. I have read that some have acheived 4GHz plus speeds, but I am not sure of the load they are placing on the CPU.
Overall I am very pleased with the price to performance offered by the AMD Phenom II 550. It offers a high quality dual core CPU with overclocking ability at a great price. Sure you can build a faster rig using an INTEL Core i7 Extreme i7CPU which costs upwards of 1000 bucks. But this little gem only sets you back 100 bucks! I doubt it the pricier high end Core i7 chip can offer 10x the performance. For a budget rig capable of performing the majority of tasks, the AMD Phenom II 550 is a stable and affordable CPU.
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