AMD Phenom X4 9600 Performance Preview

Parting Thoughts


It’s hard to draw any solid conclusions based on what we’ve observed today. As mentioned before, some of our results have been…. Odd. The results achieved by the Phenom X4 9600 showed a tendency to sea-saw between extremely promising and extremely disappointing. There have been many people waiting for this chip and we all hope this is not as good as it gets. Whether performance (or lack thereof) can be attributed to the immature state of our board BIOS or some other factor is yet to be determined, but we were expecting so much more out of the Phenom...

The Cinebench scaling (greater than 400% from 1 to 4 cores) seemed like it couldn’t possibly be right, but it was run 5x to ensure consistency. Also, the memory bandwidth and latency seems very low for AMD’s onboard memory controller. As mentioned, we’re using only equipment that is available at retail for our testing, but we also had access to an MSI 790X board that was briefly tested to ensure that the memory bandwidth and latency results on our Gigabyte 790FX board were not out of the ordinary. Results on the MSI board were slightly worse, so the Gigabyte 790FX board can be ruled out as a weak point.

The Gigabyte MA790FX-DQ6 was tested with 2GB kits of Corsair Dominator PC2-8500 5-5-5-15, and Crucial Ballistix Tracer PC2-8500, as well as a 4GB kit of OCZ PC2-6400 5-5-5-15 while we were finalizing test bed specifications, and all performed within margin of error of each other, so we can safely say that the memory is also not a weak point in our test setup.

We attempted some overclocking and were able to reach 2.7GHz benchmark stable with water cooling. 2.6 was possible with air. More voltage didn't seem to help things much and we gave up in favor of running more benchmarks to present in this review.

Armed with all of this information we're not much closer to determining the long-term impact Phenom will have on the market, but until AMD can tweak things and ramp up clock speeds it's not all that impressive, losing to the (less expensive) Q6600 in nearly every test and being only capable of a 2.7GHz overclock.



Please stay tuned for updated results in case AMD wants us to try another Phenom CPU.


To post any questions or comments you may have, you can go here: Comment Thread for Phenom Preview