Feature Articles

AMD's New Phenom X4 9000 Series

By Vijay Anand - 12 Apr 2008

Test Setup

Test Setup

For benchmarking processors in 2008, we've placed more emphasis to update our benchmarks with more up-to-date versions and a few new rendering and gaming benchmarks for a more balanced overview and impact of the processors in these often used workloads. Additionally, we've updated the testbed as well to better reflect the gamer's point of view in processor advancements by using a GeForce 8800 GT graphics card, along with the respective new platforms.

For this article, we'll primarily be comparing against Intel's old and new quad-core processors since AMD's Phenom processor pricing borders that of the lowest-end Intel quad-core processor. While we don't yet have the Q9300 processor for a more direct comparison, the older Q6600 processor would be fit for this role. Besides, Intel will be slashing prices about next week and that would further support our comparisons made today.

One note with the AMD testbed configuration was that it failed to successfully identify and run our memory at DDR2-1066 although the processor can support this memory speed. However, just prior to publishing the article, we've found that the latest motherboard BIOS is able to run the memory at DDR2-1066 - albeit a bit flaky. As such, we've kept all our testing at DDR2-800 and that thankfully was all smooth.

With that said, the following testbed configurations will be used throughout our comprehensive benchmarking segment:-

AMD Phenom X4 Testbed Configuration

ASUS M3A32-MVP Deluxe Wi-Fi (AMD 790FX chipset)
AMD Phenom X4 9850 'Black Edition', 9750, 9650 and 9550
2 x 1GB Aeneon DDR2-1066 memory modules @ DDR2-800 (CAS 5. 5-5-15)
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 200GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
ASUS GeForce 8800 GT 512MB - with NVIDIA ForceWare 169.21
Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2


Intel Core 2 Quad-Core Testbed Configuration

ASUS P5E3 Deluxe (Intel X38 Express chipset)
Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650, QX6850, Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550, Q9450, Q6700 and Q6600
2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1333 memory modules (CAS 7. 7-7-20)
2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1333 memory modules @ DDR3-1066 (CAS 7. 7-7-20) - for 1066MHz FSB processors only
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 200GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
ASUS GeForce 8800 GT 512MB - with NVIDIA ForceWare 169.21
Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2


Benchmarks

The following benchmarks were used in this review:-

BAPCo SYSmark 2007 Preview v1.02
SPEC CPU2000 v1.3
Futuremark PCMark 2005 Pro
Lightwave 3D 7.5
3ds Max8 (SP2)
Cinebench 10
XMpeg 5.0.3 (DivX 6.8 encoding)
Futuremark 3DMark06 v1.1
AquaMark3
World in Conflict v1.05
Crysis v1.1

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