Final Words and Conclusion
AMD Athlon X2 7850 Black Edition
For some time now we have been concerned by AMD’s releases, not in terms of the products they deliver but
in the way that they do so. Unfortunately it has now reached the stage where it is impacting consumers so we feel something has to be said about it.
Firstly on the Athlon X2 front we have the naming scheme, we mentioned this briefly during the 7750 launch but it continues to cause confusion for end users. This CPU is a Phenom based processor and so should really be named as the Phenom X2, AMD chose not to do this for some reason and as a result it is not clear to consumers that they are actually receiving a much improved design when they buy a 7 series processor compared to the older Athlon models.
Hopefully when dual core CPUs from AMD move to DDR3 that they revisit the product name decisions and move to one which is clearer for the end users to understand.
On the 4770 our main issue is with AMD’s insistence that all of their partners launch with reference cards which use the same cooler. This has resulted in the initial batch of cards being identical, which is fine if it stays that way for a while but as of this week the initial consumers who bought the 4770 at launch will find that partners actually have better designs ready! These will be released within a week of their card. AMD had an NDA in place for the redesigned models which has now expired and in terms of treating consumers well this is a disgrace.
We hope that in future AMD take consumers into account when making their launch plans.
So what of the products themselves? Well they are actually quite good. The 7850 Black Edition does exactly what it sets out to do and outperforms the 7750. It also retains the great ability to slot into just about any decent AM2 based board making it an ideal upgrade for consumers on older AMD CPUs.
