AMD Dragon: AMD Phenom II X4 940

INTRODUCTION

AMD has had an interesting 2008. While their GPU-division, ATI, have been able to release products that have competed well with NVIDIA’s products, their CPU-division on the other hand has had a rough time getting products out to compete with Intel’s finest. If anything this shows how quick things can change as AMD had the upper hand over Intel a few years back.

In the end of 2007 AMD released their first complete platform consisting of all AMD-products: the Spider platform. While only a codename that wasn’t meant to be used outside of AMD it consisted of a motherboard chipset, a new family of CPU’s and new GPU’s.

Today AMD is introducing their next platform, the Dragon platform. This time it is a name that also will be used externally which could mean that OEM’s will market “Dragon-based” computers.

As before the platform consists of 3 parts: Motherboard chipset, CPU’s and GPU’s. While we already are familiar with the chipset (7-series) and the GPU’s (HD4800), the CPU’s are new. With the Dragon-platform AMD is introducing the new Phenom II CPU’s. It is easy to think that this is AMD’s answer to Intel’s Core i7 but as with the Phenom processors AMD has chosen not to go after Intel’s high-end products and instead attack the market where they think the money is.

In today’s article we will go through the various parts of the Dragon-platform as well as run a bunch of benchmarks on it and competing platforms. This article will then be followed up in a few days by an article which will pit the Dragon-platform against even more competing platforms (read: The Intel Core i7) as well as some more overclocking both with air and with water cooling.