The phenom has not aged well, it's competitor the q6600 can still run the modern web.

Nah, they both aged bad, lacking crucial this days SSE 4.1 and SSE 4.2 extensions. In fact, Q6600 aged terribly, with all those Intel security flaws present.

Seriously it can’t handle web surfing?

BinaryDemon wrote on 2020-02-05, 03:22:

Seriously it can’t handle web surfing?

Nope it chokes badly to the point where browsing Facebook, YouTube, or outlook.com saw my CPU ramp to 100% and appear locked up temporarily.

It was bound to happen, it happens to all of them, I remember when my Pentium 133 was fast and well suited or my Athlon XP. Now they are best suited for their time period programs and apps, and the first gen Phenom joins them. It's still a great 2008-2010 option for a retro rig and powers my normal 7900gtx SLI setup beautifully.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-02-05, 03:18:

The phenom has not aged well, it's competitor the q6600 can still run the modern web.

Nah, they both aged bad, lacking crucial this days SSE 4.1 and SSE 4.2 extensions. In fact, Q6600 aged terribly, with all those Intel security flaws present.

I dunno I've still got a q6600 @3.2 doing modern tasks, it can still Facebook, YouTube and Netflix, same as the Phenom II. The Phenom 1 though is sluggish and unresponsive, it's as useful today as a Pentium D, Athlon 64x2, or even Athlon II.

I see what you are saying. The platform it runs on is still too modern. Pci express etc...That and as others said it hasn't aged well. If somone wanted that type of platform for some reason i'd reccomend Yorkfield xeon is the way to go.

This is what I have in my X38 rig for 10 years.
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Xeon/Intel-Xeon … 0569KJ087N.html

What you are experiencing has more to do with how shit Chrome is than how old the Phemon X4 is. I have an Athlon II X4 box that works quite well on the modern web with Firefox as well as media playback including x265. I doubt the original Phenom would be much slower than that if at all.

appiah4 wrote on 2020-02-05, 06:58:

What you are experiencing has more to do with how shit Chrome is than how old the Phemon X4 is. I have an Athlon II X4 box that works quite well on the modern web with Firefox as well as media playback including x265. I doubt the original Phenom would be much slower than that if at all.

It chocked on Firefox also, part of the problem is ram speed, the first gen is limited to ddr2 1066 while the ii supports ddr3 1333 natively and has no issues with up to 2133. I also think the 45nm parts have newer instructions.

As for the platform is to new, it's pcie 2.0 and sata2. It's best cards are 12 years old as anything faster is a waste. I do think the platform is interesting though, at least my board supports all am2 CPUs as well as all am3 CPUs, so in theory I could drop in a phenom ii x6. But first gen phenom itself is just an odd curiosity totally inadequate for the modern web.

I have a GTX 960 in my build. It's a fine GPU for that era hardware. It's fully supported on XP as well.

I hesitate to call the Phenom retro, but it was a pretty broken CPU (Phenom II does better).

Using it in XP to play XP games with a compatible PCI-E graphics makes it a good windows XP gaming platform though. In that way it can be a good retro machine.

Hmm. I'm using a Opteron 1354(4 core, 2.2 GHz, 65NM) based system as a daily driver currently alongside my old i7 rig. It's a HP Proliant ML-115. 8 GB RAM, Geforce 6800, SB Live! , 64 GB Samsung SSD and a couple of SATA hard drives. Running Linux Ubuntu 19.10 I have no problems at all with internet use, youtube et al work perfectly fine and snappy as do the rest of the modern web, I'm not a facebook user so can't comment on that. As far as I understand it, the Opteron was the first of the K10 quad cores so your Phenom should be faster by a good margin, I can only imagine that Windows 10 is the issue. Give linux a try and see how you find that.
Best regards,
Chris

BinaryDemon wrote on 2020-02-05, 03:22:

Seriously it can’t handle web surfing?

you have to remember though that websites nowadays don't have any consideration for performance whatsoever, the bloat is real.

web surfing 10+ years ago was something entirely different than it is today.

BSA Starfire wrote on 2020-02-06, 11:57:

Hmm. I'm using a Opteron 1354(4 core, 2.2 GHz, 65NM) based system as a daily driver

Nice, I use an dual Opteron 285 dual core (2.6Ghz) setup. One generation behind. I found it to be enough for daily drivin'

Cheers,
KCS

Growing up with the Phenom as a high end solution, makes me feel old reading this thread, but I think it's fair now.
As per browsing, Chrome is known for chugging Ram, but Firefox does the same with Cpu.
I recommend Vivaldi as an alternative for not powerful enough systems running Win 10.

I still use a Phenom II X6 in my work computer doing CAD work ^^
for that it aged very well imo, only the chipset isn't fully compatible with windows 10 anymore.

imi wrote on 2020-02-06, 12:02:

BinaryDemon wrote on 2020-02-05, 03:22:

Seriously it can’t handle web surfing?

you have to remember though that websites nowadays don't have any consideration for performance whatsoever, the bloat is real.

web surfing 10+ years ago was something entirely different than it is today.

Yeah I understand that, I just don’t usually have issues with tablet and thin client quad core cpus running at 1.6 ghz. I suppose modern cpu instruction sets and a fast memory interface make all the difference.

I don't have any experience with the original Phenoms, and though I've heard that they're pretty weak compared to Core 2 and Phenom II, I can't imagine that they're that bad on the modern web.

I mean, I still have an old Surface 3 with a quad-core Atom X7 that spends most of its time boosting to 2.4GHz and even it gets along with Chrome quite nicely, for what it is. I just can't imagine a 3GHz Phenom X4 being slower than that!

Edit: BTW, I also have a Phenom II X6 1090T @ just over 4GHz, and on most websites there's barely any perceptible difference between it, my i7-4930K @ 4.6, and my Ryzen 9 3900X @ 4.3.

Edit 2: Oh, Facebook, that bog of eternal stench. I haven't been on it since 2018, but I do remember it giving my Opteron 185 @ 3GHz and the Surface 3 a bit of difficulty at times. The Phenom II was always fine with it though.

Using now a Q8200 and Lubuntu. The perfomance is okay . Tried a phenom II X2 555 and the cpu usage goes to 100% easily on web browser. My 1151 mobo died after a storm . Lucky enough the HDD and PSU (corsair) are safe.

I will be building a Phenom X4 9950 (AM2+, 2.6Ghz) rig on Gigabyte GA-MA770-UD3. I already have a Phenom II X6 so Phenom II X4 makes little sense even though they would work in that board.

DDR2 is underpowered for 4 cores, but it should be fine for Windows XP workloads. I noticed it is really difficult to find cheap 4x 4GB DDR2 modules. Most people seem to have had just 4GB memory with 8GB being the upper limit. Therefore it will get only 4x DDR2 1066 2GB modules for 8GB ram total. That isn't much for Windows 7 or Vista. Windows Vista doesn't support TRIM natively and DirectX 10 ended up not being used much. Windows 7 introduced DirectX 11 which should work better with multi-core CPUs but Phenom may be too slow for the games that use it. The best fit seems to be Windows XP. Phenom II X6 is a much better fit for Windows 7.

I used GeForce 9800gtx in Athlon 64 3400+ before upgrading to GeForce 260. Phenom X4 will be getting a GeForce 780.

It works decent on Windows 7, of course - with SSD. In windows 10 is pretty useless for more than 2 Years (since 21H2 if i remember ok, in 1903 worked similar to win7 - decent). So my logic says that the problem is in windows, not chrome or firefox or any other browser. Try to play fullhd video with this phenom in windows 7, on firefox or chrome, and the CPU usage is around 70-80%. On XP is even better - around 40% if i remember right. Try to download older version of windows 10, block the updates in group policy editor, and try this CPU (even with "old" hdd)! You will be amazed 😀 So, in my oppinion - windows are the problem here, just like Apple (They were on court for deliberate "slowing down" older iphones with new IOS's), they are doing this, i guess, in co-op with Intel, AMD, Nvidia,.... Buy new hardware and everything will work ok 😀

Thanks for letting us know, I was planning to install Windows 10 on Phenom II X6 in addition to Windows 7. I'm not too pleased that I will have to disable updates. The main motivation for Windows 10 is a more recent Firefox and DirectX 12. But after my GeForce 2080 died it is less of a priority as 980 isn't powerful enough.

Based on your experience, Windows XP seems to be a good fit for the original Phenom.