Hands-on with the AMD Spider - Phenom 9700, 790 chipset and Radeon 3850 graphics
A few days before Christmas I got my hands on an AMD "Spider" Phenom 9700-based system. Since my head was ringing to the tune of "Jingle Bells" at the time, and because I had troubles downloading a needed BIOS update, all this conspired to mean that I didn't really get the chance to talk about the system that much before Holidays. Now that I've had a chance to have some serious hands-on time with the system, I feel that I can ready to post the first of what is likely to be a series of articles about this system.