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.