AMD 790FX, 4870 & Phenom II X4 940 - the Dragon platform
In its Reviewer's Guidelines, AMD strongly recommended testing the Phenom II on its "Dragon" platform, and I saw no reason not to use the "Dragon" to test it - after all, all it really consists of is a 790GX based motherboard, a Radeon HD 4870 video card, and a Phenom processor - which would also make it highly comparable to our previous Core i7 920 and QX9770 results :-)
Dragon Platform used for testing:
According to AMD:
"Dragon" is a synthesis of power, strength, and wisdom. Specifically, it is the fusion of the AMD Phenom™ II processor, ATI Radeon™ HD 4800 series graphics, AMD 7-series chipsets and AMD software that puts you in control. It's the PC platform designed for high-definition gaming, video processing and entertainment at an affordable price. The AMD Phenom II processor at the heart of Dragon platform technology is AMD's highest performing processor ever with superior efficiency.
AMD also provides the excellent AMD Overdrive and Fusion software for monitoring and overclocking the GPU, chipset and processor easily from the desktop. Mind you, some changes require a reboot, and if you are too agressive, it is easy to hang up Overdrive - but it is still a very valuable tool for overclocking the Dragon platform.
AMD is also heavily pushing GPU computing these days, pointing out that the 4xxx GPU's do an excellent job of decoding HD, playing games, and can even be used as highly parallel compute engines - as proof, AMD offers a free download, the ATI Avivo Video converter, that uses the stream processing capabilites of the 4xxx GPU's to convert video's far faster than even a quad core processor can convert them.
All 4xxx series GPU's Catalyst driver now support stream computing through the "CAL" (Compute Abstraction Layer)
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