I hope that our audience from the US had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. Now we’re back to the grind for a month-long sprint in anticipation of several exciting launches at next year’s Consumer Electronics Show. I can’t give much away, but there will be plenty to read about in the first week of 2010.

New CPUs In The 2009 Desktop Charts

First things first. I know that our Graphics Charts are in dire need of an update now that ATI’s Radeon HD 5000-series cards are at least dribbling onto the streets a few at a time (never mind the fact that they’re universally out of stock) and Nvidia has a handful of DirectX 10.1 boards (are those crickets chirping?) in the channel.

The good news, however, is that our 2009 Desktop CPU Charts have been updated to include the following processors (in addition to the models that were already tested):

AMD

Phenom II X2 545 (3 GHz)
Athlon II X2 245 (2.9 GHz)
Athlon II X2 240 (2.8 GHz)
Athlon II X2 235e (2.7 GHz)
Athlon II X3 435 (2.9 GHz)
Athlon II X3 425 (2.7 GHz)
Athlon II X3 405e (2.3 GHz)
Athlon II X3 400e (2.2 GHz)
Phenom X4 9350 (2.0 GHz)
Phenom X4 9150 (1.8 GHz)

Intel

Core i7-950 (3.06 GHz)
Core i7-870 (2.93 GHz)
Core i5-750 (2.66 GHz)

Check out the full list of processors and compared benchmarks on the 2009 Desktop CPU landing page.

An ATI Update

It’s too bad that ATI still seems to be fighting the availability issues that hampered adoption of its Radeon HD 4770—a card that served up solid mainstream performance within a reasonable thermal footprint. I’ve read a number of interviews with ATI seeking an explanation, estimated volume numbers, and guesses as to when the 5000-series boards are going to be more available.

The fact is that none of it matters.

If you want a Radeon HD 5850, 5870, or 5970 this holiday season, you’re going to have a hard time finding one (looks like Newegg is expecting some 5850s tomorrow, at least). And if you do, you’re going to pay more for it than you might have expected after reading my reviews of those three boards. Thus, I’ve updated brief passages in each card’s write-up to reflect today’s pricing. They’re all still super-fast and feature-laden, but the damn things are outright difficult to track down.