After trying “spider” platform consisting of Phenom processor, 790FX motherboard and HD3800 series graphics card, AMD decides to bring out Spider’s successor -”Dragon”. “Dragon” includes Phenom II processor, 790 series motherboard and HD4800 series card.

Phenom II processor, which is improved from Phenom, its integrated cache increases from previous 4MB to 8M, and the Phenom II 940 is equipped with as high as 3GHz frequency, supporting DDR3-1333 (940/920 with highest frequency only supports DDR2 memory). Compared with “Spider” platform, 790 series motherboard features SB750 Southbridge chip. It’s believed motherboard manufacturers will later launch new items using DDR3 memory.

According to AMD’s latest roadmap, besides bringing forward 3 main elements of “Dragon”, it also provided a test result. They used the same DDR2-800 memory, Seagate 7200.10 500G HD and Windows Vista64 SP1 OS. In the two platforms run by Phenom 9950 processor (2.6GHz) and Phenom II 940 processor (3GHz), it’s obviously seen that “Dragon” has beaten the former one totally. Its gaming performance even exceeded by over 140%.

It’s not indicated the same cards were used, so probably it’s just a trick AMD plays. But from the productivity bench which less relies on card and multimedia video coding ability (the improvement is over 20%), new-generation “Dragon” surpasses “Spider” undoubtedly.