Hardware Geeks

Finally the Phenom Triple Core CPU from AMD is available and we had one to test!

A lot of people claimed that AMD was releasing a broken quad-core chip, and pushing a faulty product to the market, but in their defense aren’t Celerons broken Pentiums and a 2.8 Ghz chips are essentially Broken 3.0 Ghz chip? After all just because a chip doesn’t qualify at a certain level doesn’t mean it’s damaged or a faulty chip.

We have had the chip for about a week and ran various bench marks using, PCMark Vantage and 3DMark, we compared the results to the quad core Phenoms.

Before I go on with what the chip benched, I wanted to point out that the new Tri Core chips work on every single motherboard with an AM2 socket, however in installing the chip on various motherboards I have to test some gave me issues others didn’t. The ones that did give me issues only required that I set Vista to the last known working configuration.

So since I am sure most of you want to know about the bench marks I will give them too you. I ran benchmarks for the Triple Core on each of the following systems and compared them to previous benchmarks of those systems with the Phenom Quad-Core 9850. None of the systems were over clocked.
System One:
Windows Vista 64 Bit
4GB of Memory
Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H Motherboard

PCMark Vantage Scored 4267 with the Phenom 9850 (Quad-Core)
PCMark Vantage Scored 4256 with the Phenom 8750 (Tri-Core)
PCMark Vantage Scored 3815 with the Athlon 64 X2 6400 (Dual Core CPU)

3DMark Scored 1411 with the Phenom 9850 (Quad-Core)
3DMark Scored 1408 with the Phenom 8750 (Tri-Core)

System Two:
Same specs as above just a different motherboard ASUS M2N-SLI

PCMark Vantage Scored 4307 with the Phenom 9850 (Quad-Core)
PCMark Vantage Scored 4298 with the Phenom 8750 (Tri-Core)

3DMark Scored 1423 with the Phenom 9850 (Quad-Core)
3DMark Scored 1419 with the Phenom 8750 (Tri-Core)

The first thing you will probably notice is, the benchmarks are nearly identical, and this is further proof that the Tri-Core CPU’s are not broken in anyway or form but identical to the Quad Cores, just with 1 core disabled.

But benchmarks do not give you the full picture, when I put the systems to heavy multi tasking and had Microsoft Word, Photoshop, The Sims (In Windows Mode) with AIM and Live Messenger running, the Quad Core was able to handle it better than the Tri-Core. But how often do you have a Gaming running while Multi-Tasking? With the Sims not running both CPUs worked flawlessly and with no problems.

So my recommendation if you are upgrading your system, and are on a tight budget a tri-core will work wonders for you, it’s essentially a quad-core CPU.

The Triple Cores were for sale at Newegg over the weekend, but they seem to have removed them, so check newegg soon if you want one.

Here are some useful links:
CPU heatsink install vids:
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_869_9460%5E6678,00.html

Recommended heatsinks for Phenom:
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/1,,30_182_869_15345%5E15353,00.html?1204064165

Recommended motherboards for Phenom:
http://products.amd.com/en-us/RecommendedMBFilter.aspx

Phenom Tech Docs:
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_869_739%5E15343,00.html

Post Tags: amd  cpu  phenom  triple core 

Next entry: HP Helps HardwareGeeks Give Back Previous entry: Finally some Ultimate Extras