We used Asus' Crosshair II Formula 780a motherboard for overclocking using the Zero Therm NV120. Not adjusting the voltage we were able to hit 3GHz stable, a new high for Phenoms, but adjusting the voltage to 1.425v we were able to hit 3.2GHz stable and reach 3.3GHz though it blue screened in 3DMark. This was a 600MHz stable overclock, the best yet for AMD's Phenom.

Trying to overclock the low wattage 9350e didn't fair as well moving only from 2GHz to 2.34GHz despite increasing the voltage heavily.

Here's our current test system.

Our test OS was Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 with nForce driver revisions 175.19 and chipset driver revision of 18.11. V-sync was disabled for graphic tests.

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

Unsurprisingly the 9950 isn't too far from the 9850 in Crysis. The Intel Q9300 comes out on top here.

UT3 shows the 9950 as a great competitor with the more expensive Intel Q9300.

Not too many shocks here in 3DMark 2006 but the 9950 does over 100 points more than the 9850.

Let's move onto to more benchmarks.