Athlon x4 620 v E8500 OC

[aweber]

The TweakTown review of the AMD chip was impressive with regard to price/performance when OC'd. Getting 3.9Ghz on air without a lot of work is pretty cool.

But looking at the comparison graphs, the E8500 -- OC'd to 3.7 and I think with two fewer cores -- seems to beat the Athlon all over the place.

So what makes this cheap new chip more desirable than the E8500?

Even more interested: How is Intel's chip beating the AMD chip with half the cores???

Thanks,
AJ

[artdrivers]

The last time I checked the E8500 was $80 more than the 620. Price wise you would need to compare it to a E6500

[aweber]

I can understand that. I wonder why the review chose to compare it against the E8500 then?

And technically, it was a review of the new AMD offering, not a comparo, so not a lot to tell us which they chose to compare in the charts and why, but I guess in a comparison-test they would have chose like-priced CPUs.

Still wondering why, in general, a slower (in terms of clock speed) chip with half the cores was beating the AMD (with twice as many cores running faster). I have heard from a lot of AMD pundits that the AMD chips are measurably faster when comparing same-speed chips. This is so contrary to that, I'm just intrigued!

Thanks for the reply,
AJ