How are the AMD Phenom Quad-Core CPUs?

I'm seeing pretty good deals on notebooks with AMD Phenom Quad-Core processors. I've seen one with the top-line N970 and Radeon 6650 GPU for around the $600 mark.

I realize they're not going to be anywhere near as fast as an i7 (or i5 for that matter) due to lack of L3 cache and no turbo boost. But what about for general purpose, rare video editing, and light to moderate gaming when paired with the above GPU? Could such a CPU handle something like Crysis 2 at medium to medium-high settings at 1366x768 or 1280x720 resolution?

 

They are pretty awful. Most of them are inferior not just to Sandy Bridge, but even to mid-range Arrandale (dual-core beating a quad-core!) in heavily threaded applications and because of the low clock speeds and lack of Turbo Boost, if an application relies heavily on one core, you're screwed. There have actually been threads here where these CPUs are shown to be bottlenecking games.

That said, the N970 is clocked at 2.2GHz and may be getting to the point of acceptable performance. For $600, that configuration is not unreasonable, though I'm not sure how well it will handle Crysis 2 (it used to be that GPUs were almost always the limiting factor, but now that games are made primarily for consoles, the CPU has become a little more important since the console CPUs were ahead of their time whereas the GPUs were obsolete almostupon release).

 

For 600-700ish you could find a comparable machine with a Core i5 and similar GPU performance and the i5 will outperform the Phenom II Quad core 80-90% of the time.

If you are rendering 24/7, then the quad core will benefit you but they suffer in single threaded applications as stated above.

 

The phenoms are lol. They suck even compared to an i5, as others have stated. BUT, it should suffice for some mid level gaming.

 

As already said by others, they get destroyed by even last-gen i5's in anything that isn't heavily threaded and even in applications that are, they only equal or slightly outperform an i5.

In gaming, though, an i5 does not offer as much performance increase as you would expect. The difference is usually only a few FPS. I used to own a dv6 with an N970/ATI 5650 and I played Crysis on high settings with no AA/AF at 1366x768 at around 30-35FPS. I am sure that with a better GPU and lower settings, it could handle Crysis 2 at decent frame rates.