Icrontic's Matthew Carothers reviews AMD's flagship video card.

Hot on the heels of the release of its very successful 4000 series graphics cards, AMD has released three new Phenom processors into their lineup—the X4 9950, 9350e and 9150e.

What do you do to stir up the competition in a market saturated in dual-cores? How about offer three cores for the price of two. This is exactly what AMD hopes to accomplish with their aggressively priced, tri-core Phenom X3.

At first, I was not sure if I wanted to complicate the review with both socket 775 and AM2 results but in the end I am very glad that I did. It is not safe to assume that a heatsink will perform as well on AM2 as it does on 775.

The Black Edition processors offer something that AMD has historically reserved only for the most elite (and expensive) processors: multiplier-unlocking.

The quad core chips that will first replace dual cores are going to merge two dual core dies into a two-die, four-core package OR one die with four cores. Confused? We'll explain it in plain English.

We're back to evaluate our predictions and reassess the the situation in the world of AMD

Today, it is becoming evident that the hardware industry as a whole will be abandoning traditional DDR memory in the not too distant future. AMD's latest revision to the K8 architecture incorporates a new DDR2 memory controller, a new socket design and some other pleasant surprises. Short-Media will be turning another page in the K8's history, and will be taking an in depth look at AMD's new Socket AM2 platform.

What we're going to discuss, the terms we'll use, and a few feature descriptions.

Starts with discussions of power, heat and cooling, OC in a nutshell, and the HTT bus. Continues with the math you'll need, CPU Multipliers, CMOS, bus locking, memory modules and timings. Ends with a discussion of CPU stepping codes, CPU selection, the Mobile Athlon 64, and other hardware.

The tools you'll need: Prime95, OCCT, Memtest86+, CPU-Z, A64 MemFreq 1.1, AMD64 MaxTCase, Monitoring Tools, Clockgen, A64 Tweaker, and several benchmarking products.

Steps 1 & 2: Qualifying your system, and finding the maximum CPU clock. We'll also do some longer-term stability testing.

Step 3: Finding the maximum memory clock at the best possible timings. Know your memory! Then we'll look at stability in the operating system, which is very different than surviving a benchmark.

Step 4: Balancing memory and CPU clock. We select a safe maximum CPU and memory clock with long-term stability testing. We conclude with benchmarking and some final thoughts.

"What Athlon do I buy?" To begin to answer that question here is a compiled list of all the current platforms and brief outlines for each including my personal recommendations for what's hot and what's not.