Hardware Geeks

Today AMD announced the availability of the Pnenom II X4 940 Black Edition and 920 processors which should be available now from major e-tailers like Newegg, and also from some OEMs real soon the two processors will cost under $300. ($275 for the 940 and $235 for the 920)

I have been using the 940 Black Edition for nearly a month now, and I have to say my system hasn’t booted up or performed as fast as it currently is since I first built this system a year a go. AMD has seriously put a lot of work into the new Phenoms and for the first time in a while I feel they are actually competing at the same level Intel is.

What I love about the Phenom II’s the most is how easy it installs if you are upgrading your system, there is no need to get a new motherboard if you are updating your system, just remove the OLD CPU and stick the new one in.

The only problem I had when I upgraded to the Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition was a DRM issue with Windows Media Player.

One my new Phenom II was installed, I booted up Windows and immediately noticed a faster boot time. It kind of reminded me of this video I posted a little over a year ago. Camera is broke over the holiday and haven’t had a chance to replace it, but if I were to make a video it would of been shorted than the one I linked too. In fact in the video the Spider Phenom system booted up in 35 seconds, the Dragon Phenom II system I now have booted up in 29 seconds. 29 seconds with the same motherboard, same memory, same hard drive, but with a copy of Vista that was installed a year ago. Just shows how powerful the new processor is.

But a mere test to see how fast the system boots up isn’t really much, so I ran several benchmarks over two days with PCMark Vantage. My average PCMark score was 5472, which is pretty impressive since I did not overclock the CPU.

Speaking of overclocking, I am chicken when it comes to tinkering with the bios and or other settings, in fact I have fried a couple of systems trying to overclock. I have even fried systems that I successfully overclocked, but the liquid cooling unit I used began to sweat and well it leaked.

So because of the bad experiences I have had overclocking, I decided to not overclock unless it was someone else’s system. But AMD has made it so easy to overclock that you really need not be afraid and your mother can do it. AMD did this with their AMD OverDrive Utility which was released last year. So I used AMD OverDrive to overclock my system.

Here is a Screen Shot before changing settings

As you can see the core speed prior to increasing the performance is 3000.88 MHz it fluctuates between 2998 and 3001.

Now a screen shot after setting AMD OverDrive to performance level to 10

Now the CPU core speed is 3075.90 and fluctuates between that and 3078. So I decided to run another PCMark test and I ran several of them over a two day time frame and they averaged 5805. While those scores are no where near the Intel i7 which I am sure a lot of you want to compare these new Phenoms II too, but keep in mind the i7’s cost triple to quadruple what any Phenom II cost.

By the way those clock speeds and benchmarks were achived by using AMD OverDrdive in Basic mod. I switched to advance mode, inreased the CPU Voltage to 1.45 Volts, the multiplier from 15x to 18x and saw the core speed jump to 3900 MHz. I agan ran several benchmarks over a two day period and the average score was 6352.

AMD OverDrive maxes out the CPU Voltage at 1.45 Volts, so that is probably why I am only able to get a max of 3900 MHz, however you can and I have edited my preference file for AMD OverDrive which allowed me to push the Voltage to 1.75 V, and I am seeing clockspeeds of 4100 Mhz. I haven’t run any benchmarks with those speeds yet as I am in Vegas for CES and didn’t have time too, but I will as soon as I get back to NY. But I expect them ot be in the 6500 - 6700 range in PCMark

For those curious here is how you edit the preferences for AMD OverDrive.
“You can extend it to the max VID value of 1.550V by editing the “Preference.xml” file (with notepad.exe) in AOD installation folder.  Just find “MaxVcoreEnabled” and change it from “0” to “1”” Tip provided by Damon Munzy from AMD.

Benchmarks don’t always give you a true indication on how well the CPU will perform either, but I can tell you that for the past month programs have loaded faster, word for example no longer gives me a splash screen, outlook doesn’t hang for a minute or two while it waits for my inbox to load, the CPU has rejuvenated my system, game play has also improved a bit especially with AMD Fusion.

The new AMD Phenom II’s are so powerful, I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple started to use them in their systems to help keep their system prices low in these times of economic turmoil.

Overall the Phenom II processors are great for those of us who like to overclock but area afraid too, for those of us who don’t have a lot of money to throw away on a CPU but want a high end experience. The Phenom II x4 CPU’s are a definite Must Have and because of that we award it our 5 Star Must Have Award.

AMD Phenom II X4 940 and 920 Processor Specifications:
Processor Frequency: X4 940 (Black Edition) = 3.0GHz / X4 920 = 2.8GHz
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 (2MB total L2 per processor)
L3 Cache Size: 6MB (shared)
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)
Memory Bandwidth: Up to 17.1GB
HyperTransport 3.0 Link: One 16-bit/16-bit link @ up to 3.6GHz full duplex (1.8GHz x2)
HyperTransport 3.0 Bandwidth: Up to 14.4GB/s
Total Processor Bandwidth: Up to 31.5 GB/s total bandwidth
Packaging: Socket AM2+ 940-pin organic micro pin grid array (micro-PGA)
Fab location: Fab 36 wafer fabrication facilities in Dresden, Germany
Process Technology: 45-nanometer DSL SOI (silicon-on-insulator) technology
Approximate Transistor count: ~ 758 million (45nm)
Approximate Die Size: 258 mm2 (45nm)
Max Ambient Case Temp: 62o Celsius
Nominal Voltage: 0.875 - 1.5 Volts
Max TDP: 125 Watts
*NOTE: MC configurable for dual 64-bit channels for simultaneous read/writes

Post Tags: review  amd  cpu  processors  phenom ii  dragon platform 

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