Quote Originally Posted by 'Jheusse',index.php?page=Thread&postID=202633#post 202633
From my research recently looking at upgrades myself, there are large performance improvements when going from original Phenom to Phenom II. Anandtech did at least one article on the topic, the architecture and on-chip cache design is apparently much much better with the Phenom II.

Clock rate is one variable and it doesn't necessarily correlate to real world performance, lots of variables can affect that, so no you don't want to just buy the biggest number.

Likely to be buying a quad core Phenom II 3.0 GHz later today.
When people say 60fps no problem, I'd like to know what their fps is in Dalaran with 5 clones... otherwise the numbers are meaningless to me since I can get 150 fps in the old world (if I set maxfps to 999) but Dalaran is only 12-15 no mater what I do.

Can you can drop the Phenom IIs into a AM2+ motherboard? Is there that much of an improvement without also upgrading motherboard to AM3 socket/DDR3?

I've got an Phenom 9950 right now in a AM2+ mobo but don't care to invest any more money with AMD unless I can just replace the chip and get a nice boost that way. If I have to replace the motherboard and ram I might as well make the switch to Intel.