Unfortunately with the 4770 and AMD's new 7850 Athlon launching at the same time we ran out of time to fully review the 7850 and our dual core benchmarks are a little older. You can check out our 7750 review though which should be somewhat close considering the 7850 is just a 100MHz bump up from the 7750. AMD also said overclocking should be good with ACC enabled so we gave that a quick spin.

If you don't know the 7850 is based off the Kuma core which is based off the first Phenom's architecture which means it is 65nm and has higher power consumption and not quite the performance that the Phenom II offers.

Unfortunately we topped out at 3.3GHz which is exactly where we did with the 7750. This time, however, it was at a much lower voltage but any higher voltage caused it to crash. That said, we did have some motherboard issues so that might be the problem.

Specs:

AMD Athlon™ X2 7850 Processor Specifications:

Processor Core Frequency: 2.8GHz

X2 7850 Black Edition Tray OPN: OPN# AD785ZWCJ2BGH

X2 7850 Black Edition PIB OPN: OPN# AD785ZWCGHBOX

L1 Cache Sizes: 64K of L1 instruction and 64K of L1 data cache per core (512KB total L1 per processor)

L2 Cache Sizes: 512KB of L2 data cache per core (1MB total L2 per processor)

L3 Cache Size: 2MB (shared)

Total Cache (L2+L3): 3MB

Memory Controller Type: Integrated 128-bit wide memory controller *

Memory Controller Speed: Up to 1.8GHz with Dual Dynamic Power Management

Types of Memory Supported: Support for unregistered DIMMs up to PC2 8500 (DDR2-1066MHz)

HyperTransport 3.0: One 16-bit/16-bit link @ up to 3.6GHz full duplex (1.8GHz x2)

Total Processor-to-system Bandwidth: Up to 28.5 GB/s bandwidth [Up to 17.1GB/s memory bandwidth (DDR2-1066) + 14.4GB/s (HT3)]

Packaging: Socket AM2+ 940-pin organic micro pin grid array (micro-PGA)

Fab location: GLOBALFOUNDARIES Fab 1 module 1 in Dresden, Germany (formerly AMD Fab 36)

Process Technology: 65-nanometer DSL SOI (silicon-on-insulator) technology

Approximate Transistor count: ~ 450 million (65nm)

Approximate Die Size: 285 mm2 (65nm)

Max Ambient Case Temp: 73o Celsius

Nominal Voltage: 1.2-1.25 Volts

Max TDP: 95 Watts



*Notes:

Black Edition processors support software-selectable increases to memory controller, HyperTransport, DDR3 and CPU core frequency

MC configurable for dual 64-bit channels for simultaneous read/writes