AMD Phenom X4 9750 Quad Core CPU Review

Sandra Memory Latency, Processor Multi-Media, and Processor Arithmetic

The software version used for these tests is SiSoftware Sandra Professional Home XII.SP2 and the three benchmarks used are the Memory Latency, Processor Multi-Media, and Processor Arithmetic benchmarks. These three benchmarks were chosen as they provide a good indication of three varying types of system performance. The latency test shows performance of the memory controller, the multi-media test shows how the processor handles multi-media instructions and data, and the arithmetic test shows how the processor floating point instructions. These three tests illustrate three important areas of a computer’s speed and provide a wide scope of results. For our purposes we are hoping they can shed so light on the lack luster performance of the Phenom 9750 so far.


As we suspected, the SuperPi and other memory intensive benchmarks are being hindered by the Phenom’s less than stellar memory latency. A good chunk of this problem can be laid at the feet of the relatively slow 2MB of L3 cache. The rest can be blamed on the added latency incurred by the hardware TLB errata workaround and the fact that the memory controller is brand new which means it is in need of serious tweaking.

However, on the positive side the memory latency is not as terrible as the TLB error prone B2s are and the Phenoms MFLOPS scores are very nice. This tells us that while the core architecture needs tweaking it does have the potential to be a great architecture in the future and maybe even better than the venerable k8 was!

PCMark Vantage

The latest iteration of the popular system benchmark is PCMark Vantage from the Futuremark crew. The PCMark series has always been a great way to either test specific areas of a system or to get a general over view of how your system is performing. For our results, we simply run the basic benchmark suite which involves a wide range of tests on all of the sub-systems of the computer.


A difference of 27 points is nothing and this is very good news as PCMark Vantage is supposed to be a benchmark for showing what Joe and Jane SixPack will see when they use their computer in day to day life. For all intents and purposes according to this benchmark, most people will not see any difference in performance between a Q6600 and a Phenom 9750.