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We’ll be giving away another computer! The old computer sent to me by AMD will be given away the day after Christmas, provided we’ve reached 20,000 YouTube subscribers. The reason I’m able to do this? AMD has sent me a new Spider system to try out and review. In order to be eligible to win, you need to be subscribed to the YouTube Channel, leave a comment on my blog, and be present in the chat room at the time of the giveaway. That’s all there is to it! Now, let’s take a look at this new Spider!

The Spider Phenom has a quad-core Phenom 9700 2.4GHz processor, AMD 790FX chipset and an 256MB ATI Radeon HD 3850 graphics card. The idea with the Spider platform is to be able to offer a complete set of products that are guaranteed to work the best together. This however does not mean that each separate component only works with other AMD products. In fact, AMD also talk a lot about being open and that we will see motherboards using competitor chipsets that will support CrossfireX, just like we have Intel-based motherboards today that support Crossfire.

The heart of the platform is Phenom, the quad core desktop processor built on the same technology as the Quad Core Opteron, also known as Barcelona, while graphics is driven by its new Radeon HD 3800 processor, which shipped last week. AMD isn’t fooling around with this platform. Thanks to the new 790FX chipset and CrossFire technology from ATI, PCI Express 2.0 and HyperTransport 3.0 interfaces, the Spider motherboard design allows for up to four graphics cards operating in parallel.

Because gamers are known for their love of tweaking a computer’s performance, AMD has included two utilities to help them in their tinkering. AMD OverDrive software is a tuning utility for overclocking (define) the computer and adjusting the voltages, something that often has to be done when over clocking. Overall, I’m very happy with this computer thus far. It’s fast, and it’s quiet. I’m running Vista on it, and it runs. Need I say more?

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