The Stories: Review: AMD Phenom 9500 Processor

After a long time, our ship of waiting meets an end….A brand new processor, AMD Phenom and Spider platform come up with AMD 790 chipset and a pair of ATi Radeon HD 3870 graphic card. At this moment there would be only two Phenom those were released to the market, 9500 and 9600 but 9700 still in the test progress.

What AMD said about advantages over Core 2 Quad are true quad-core design so each core of processor is independent, 2MB of L3 cache, Cool’n’Quiet 2.0 technology, the fast HyperTransport 3.0 bus support for 1067MHz DD2 memory, etc.

The independent processor’s core sounds good but some comment said that it’s unnecessary in reality, it seems impossible to tell the different.

Phenom use an AM2+ socket which need an AM2+ motherboard for the benefit of HyperTransport 3.0 technology.

According to Reghardware.co.uk, they used Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe with AMD's 790FX chipset for testing and they also used Athlon 64 X2 6400+ on a Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H motherboard with AM2 socket. On the other hand they ran Core 2 Q6600 on an MSI Diamond X38 which help you compare to Intel’s side.

PCMark05 Result

Longer are better.

From the graph above, you will see a predictable result that AM2+ processor will lose performance when AM2+ plug into AM2 socket.

AMD also create an overclocking utility named OverDrive. It allows you to tuning by user ten-levels slider, you will see the clock speed increase for every step you take. You can also overclock the PCI Express clock speed.

After overclocking the Phenom from 2.4GHz to 2460MHz, the memory to 1094 MHz, PCI Express bus to 120 MHz and raise HyperTransport 3.0 to 205 MHz, that can request the points from PCMark05 from 8183 to 8397