Here's our current test system.

Our test OA was Windows Vista Home with the ATI Catalyst 7.3 drivers and Nvidia's 174.53 of Forceware drivers. All the latest software revisions were used in our testing.

Note: While we tried to disable the TLB patch in BIOS we were unable to do so and relied on AMD Overdrive's Turbo feature to disable and enable the TLB patch. "Green" being enabled and "Red" being disabled. We have some questions about the results though as more often than not we saw little changes between the two and occasionally the opposite of what we were expecting with the "Green" in theory TLB enabled patch doing much better in Valve's particle benchmark. PC Mark though gave us results along the line of which we'd see with the performance hit from TLB patch enabled.

For our games testing we used lower graphic settings in order to stress the processor and relieve the graphics card from being the bottleneck.

We ran through this test to verify it multiple times and here we see Crysis with the Phenom 9850BE blows away the 9600. The TLB error seems to be strong here and also the Phenom benefits tremendously by the higher clock speed.

Unreal Tournament 3 again shows huge gains by over 50fps here at these lower graphic settings. Unreal Tournament 3 is one of the few games on the market to use all four processor cores so we believe it an important test.

Futuremark's synthetic benchmark 3DMark 2006 SE shows somewhat smaller gains than we were expecting but the 9850 easily bests the previous top rated Phenom.

Let's move onto to more benchmarks.