AMD Phenom X4 9750 Quad Core CPU Review

3DMark Vantage

3DMark Vantage is the latest release by Futuremark, creators of the 3DMark suite. This program is the first Futuremark version of 3DMark designed exclusively for Windows Vista. 3DMark Vantage consists of 2 CPU and 2 GPU tests as well as and 6 feature tests all of which are very hardware intensive. Four presets are available to allow for those with older PCs to benchmark just as easily as those with cutting edge hardware. For our testing, we will use all settings set at their default values.


Believe it or not, losing to the Q6600 here is not a bad thing. Its not a good thing either, but the important thing to understand is that the difference is less than 8%. With some heavy tweaking AMD can easily turn this around and make the 9x50s true winners.

3DMark 2006

For all you Vista abstainers here is the last of the 3dMark XP line. Futuremark 3DMark 06 has been the worldwide standard in advanced 3D game performance benchmarking for a few years now. A fundamental tool for PC users and gamers, 3DMark06 uses advanced real-time 3D game workloads to measure PC performance using a suite of DirectX 9 3D graphics tests, CPU tests, and 3D feature tests. For our purposes we will be focusing in on the CPU tests. All settings were once again left at their default value.


Unfortunately things are not as rosy in XP land as they were in Vista. For 3DMark 2006 the lower 3000 level is where high end dual cores reside and not where Quads belong. Once again AMD needs to spend a lot of money/time/effort and tweak the K10 ASAP or they are going to lose their core base of customers for another upgrade cycle and I honestly don’t know how many more bad cycles AMD can handle.