AMD has launched its Phenom II CPUs, and introduces a new "Dragon" platform. Dragon marries Phenom II with the Radeon HD 4800-line of 3D cards and AMD's 790-series chipsets into a complete, AMD-made gaming PC. The big news with Dragon is really the Phenom II chips. Available as the 3.0GHz Phenom II X4 940 and the 2.8GHz Phenom II X4 920, these new quad-core CPUs are AMD's first 45-nanometer desktop processors, and they finally bring AMD in line with Intel's 45-nano manufacturing process, used in its Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, and Core i7 chips. Phenom II X4 940 isn't designed to overtake Intel's Core i7 965-Extreme Edition as the fastest desktop chip around, but it also doesn't have a $1,000 price tag. At $275 (at price per chip by the thousand, anyway), the 3.0GHz Phenom II X4 940 instead competes with Intel's midrange CPUs. Leaked benchmarks (big grain of salt here, folks), show the X4 940 holding up well against Intel's 2.93GHz Core i7 940 part, which currently retails for over $550.

The first reviews of the AMD Phenom II X4 920 and 940 CPUs can be found on AMDZone, AnandTech, bit-tech,� Bjorn3d, Elite Bastards, Guru3D, HotHardware, Legit Reviews, Legion Hardware, Neoseeker, Overclockers Club, PCGH, T-Break, Tech Report, TechSpot, Tom's Hardware, TweakTown and X-bit labs.

>In the Phenom II, AMD has produced a chip that comes strikingly close to duplicating the performance of Intel's mid-range Core 2 Quad processors, the Q9300 and Q9400. The Phenom II proved to be faster in several of our gaming tests, but it was slower in some components of WorldBench, including WinZip and Photoshop, which lowered its overall score a bit. On the whole, though, the key characteristic we saw through the bulk of our performance tests was the remarkable parity between the Phenom II X4 940 and the Core 2 Quad Q9400-and the same between their siblings one notch down the ladder. The idle power use of our Phenom II X4 940 system was a couple of watts lower than its Core 2 Quad-based adversary, although it did draw 24W more under load, which was the Phenom II's one definitive disadvantage in this comparison. The Phenom II may even be able to rival the Core 2 Quad's vaunted overclocking headroom-and it's hard to argue with the ease of overclocking a Black Edition processor with a simple multiplier tweak.

Considering that the Core 2 Quad Q9400 was the featured processor in the "Sweeter spot" build in our latest system guide, the Phenom II puts AMD back in the running right in the middle of the enthusiast PC market, where price and performance converge in solid value. You still don't need (and probably won't benefit from) quad cores for gaming, but the Phenom II's individual cores are more than fast enough to perform well in games, in addition to the multitasking and multithreaded performance they can deliver in other scenarios.

With the Socket AM3 versions of the Phenom II looming so close on the horizon, I suspect many folks may choose to wait on building or buying an all-new AMD-based system. Current owners of Socket AM2+ motherboards may not wish to delay any further, though, and if they've been waiting to upgrade from something like an Athlon X2, well, I wouldn't blame them for making the leap now. Just remember that you're sacrificing an easy upgrade path to newer motherboards and DDR3 memory.