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%