| AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition |
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| Written by Jeff_Tom | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Thursday, 08 January 2009 00:30 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
If you're reading this review the odds are you're probably very aware that times have not been great for AMD's processor business for about 2.5 years which is a lifetime in the technology world. ATI, which they acquired in 2006, also it had seemed had a similar fate until this summer when they not only bested their main competitor but they did so by slashing prices dramatically from the level they were at. AMD also has some new products that are coming under wraps today with the Phenom II processor which may not change the game the way the Radeon 4000 series did but is the most competitive AMD has been in some time. The processors launching today from AMD are the Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition and Phenom II X4 920. Naming schemes have changed again dramatically and as you might be aware their naming scheme now matches identically to Intel's new Core i7 with their 920 and 940. This isn't the first time we've seen this in the processor realm but you have to go back some time until AMD they were so exactly similar. A little disappointing but we assume of course the intention is to draw the average consumer towards the similarly titled product. We're not sure how well it work but it's worth a shot. The major change in Phenom II is that it is built using a 45nm immersion lithography manufacturing process which, "enables higher frequencies, tighter tolerances and lower current leakage." The other major change is the L3 cache which is now three times as large at 6MB over 2MB of Phenom and the L3 cache is also 2-cycles faster. There are a number of other improvements as well, ACC (Advanced Clock Calibration) is now apparently baked into the silicon so a SB750 chipset is not required to get more overclocking headroom out of the Phenom II. Another thing to note is the HT bus on these new processors runs at 1.8GHz instead of 2GHz of the 9950 due to a trade off in priorities to get the chip ready to market. The bus isn't even close to being saturated with anything but servers so this isn't a major loss. This however does bring us to the AM3 versions of the Phenom II which will support 2GHz HyperTransport bus speeds and should be out just a few months from now. These processors will work in Socket AM2+ motherboards that are certified and support the upcoming Socket AM3 with DDR3 memory support. AMD is letting people know about this ahead of time in case they want to wait but we don't expect a major shift in performance with DDR3 and it still is much more expensive than DDR2 which is dirt cheap currently. Here's the full list from AMD.
Here is our AMD test system.
Here is our Intel test system.
Our test OS was Windows Vista 64-bit SP1. ATI Catalyst drivers were the latest from AMD an updated version of 8.12 not currently on their site. We didn't have a Core i7 processor to test unfortunately but we did do a few other neat things. We overclocked our 9950 Black Edition to 3GHz, the same speed as the Phenom II 940 so you can get a more direct comparison of the two processors and we also down clocked our Phenom II to 2.5GHz, the same clock speed as our Penryn Intel Core 2 Q9300 to give a more direct representation of that architecture. This isn't perfect but it should be very close to how those processors would perform. With our Phenom 9950 overclock we changed the HyperTransport bus to 1.8GHz so it was the same as the Phenom II 940. The 9950 normally runs at 2GHz HT clock.
The Phenom II 940 dominates in the processors we tested with Unreal Tournament II and the underclocked Phenom II 940 with Penryn is exactly the same performance clock for clock. Unreal Tournament 3 is a major engine which scales among all four cores well. It leans towards three more than four as it was built primarily with the XBox 360 in mind. There's a 42fps increase over AMD's previous best processor which is quite impressive. Obviously this engine loves cache.
In Crysis's CPU benchmark again the Phenom II comes out on top above all other processors. A Phenom I overclocked to 3GHz is still 6fps behind Phenom II.
3DMark Vantage is synthetic but this CPU score result should give you a general idea of how processors can perform.
We decoded an 11 minute deleted scene from a DVD into QuickTime format for playing on iPods. Phenom II is again on top out of all these processors and 55 seconds faster than the Phenom 9950.
Valve particle benchmark tests how well processors handle rendering tons of particles on screen with multiple processors. Things tend to even out here a bit but Phenom II 940 is on top and the 9950 at the bottom.
Valve Map creation renders a Valve map and once more Phenom II 940 is the quickest though things are somewhat close with the Q9300 processor.
World in Conflict is a popular real-time strategy game with an intense engine. Even at only medium settings the graphics card is more so the bottle neck here as things even out though Phenom II is yet again the fastest if only by 3fps. Pushing the resolution and graphics settings which we didn't in our gaming tests would only even things our more unless you have an incredibly powerful video card.
In Cinebench 10 the Phenom II 940 blows away all other processors finishing rendering ten seconds before the Intel Q9300.
No change here in Pov-RAY 3.7 either as the Phenom II 940 proves it's clearly capable of taking on Penryn.
At AMD's headquarters here in Austin they showed off some amazing overclocks of around 6GHz+ but that was with liquid nitrogen and insane voltages. We aimed to hit 3.8GHz stable at voltages that weren't too high and that was near impossible. We went all the way up to 1.56v to hit 3.8GHz somewhat stable and we also for a while hit 3.9GHz but it was definitely not stable. 3.7 or 3.6GHz seems more lofty for longterm stable overclocks but you have to be willing to throw some voltage at these processors. They seem willing to take it at least.
Update:We received word from AMD that our Phenom II idle power consumption numbers might be a little high. It looks like some other sites got results closer to 100W. We triple checked our scores though and received basically similar results but about 15W higher. Something though you should keep in mind though with the numbers. For idle power consumption testing we left the computer idle for ten minutes
in Windows Vista on the desktop and checked the numbers. There was some
fluctuations but here's the lower scores which it tended to lean towards. The
3GHz Phenom II is about even with the 9950 idle. At load though with Vale's Map
Creation Benchmark the Phenom 9950 is 20W more than the Phenom II which comes in
under 200W at load.
Conclusion: Phenom II 940 is not what the Radeon 4800 was for ATI but it is an excellent processor which makes AMD the most competitive they've been in years and beats Intel's previous architecture Penryn at times clock for clock. Phenom II is a real challenger to Intel's Core 2 Quad series of Penryn chips and if they can ram up the clock speed they could take on the Core i7 from benchmarks we've seen. Compared to the original Phenom, Phenom II is also a massive bump thanks to both a large increase in clock speed, cache, and architecture improvements at times the performance difference is nothing short of major between the previous best 9950 and the Phenom II 940. This should be lauded as they ramp things up. Overall what AMD is able to deliver which Nvidia nor Intel are is a well rounded platform of the graphics card, chipset, and processor which are either #1 in their league or very close and for an excellent price. Intel's Core i7 motherboards are still ridiculously expensive and though DDR3 has come down a little price compared to the deals out there for DDR2 it's not even close. AMD can compete much more on value than their competitors and they seem to be emphasizing it. Hopefully OEM's and consumer's take notice. Pricing: Phenom II 940 will launch at $275 today and the Phenom II 920 $235.
Score: 95%
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