Amd phenom x4 9600 black edition reviews

This refers to its unlocked multiplier which theoretically makes overclocking very easy. Starting with our gaming benchmarks, the BE really impresses, clearly coming out on top in the low resolution Crysis test though just missing out to the Intel Q in the high resolution, 1, x 1,, test.

Also, against its price competitor, the Q, the BE holds its own. Our penultimate test is in image editing using Photoshop Elements 4. This is a really good test for showing baseline, single-core performance and in this case demonstrates that the BE is very competitive, even against the all conquering i7 Nevertheless, the BE is impressive for its price in terms of default clock speed performance.

The real question now, is how does it overclock? We started out conservatively, upping the multiplier from 17x to 18x and giving us a total clock speed of 3. This was completely stable so we continued onto 19x for a total clock speed of 3. This also seemed pretty stable, booting into windows and starting some benchmarks, but after a short while it crashed.

We therefore upped the CPU voltage to 1. Moving further on, we tried After this we started experimenting more and more until at one point we were able to start benchmarks at 4. However, as is always the case with overclocking, the price you pay for more performance is more power consumption. We saw our idle system power consumption rise from W to W while load power consumption went from W to W.

From past experience, the Phenom processors do not overclock very well when raising the FSB, which may be an issue for overclockers considering Intel Core 2s do very well from FSB injections.

In an effort to counter this, AMD has unlocked the multiplier of their Black Edition processors, which they are selling at a bargain basement price. Another feature of the Phenom X4 that we should point out is that the memory controller is clocked at 2. It will be interesting to see how the stacks up against the rest of the Phenom family and of course, Intel's Q RSS Newsletter Join. AMD have been playing catch-up with Intel ever since Intel's Core architecture reared it's not so ugly head.

Unfortunately, they didn't manage fast, but they did manage to get one out. Phenom is a native Quad Core chip which is fantastic, but it's launch was marred by reactively low clock-speeds. The Phenom we have here today kicks us off at 2. Well the thing is, not a whole lot is actually new with the new CPU.

AMD have gone with a three tiered cache level for their Phnom processors with the L3 being labelled "Smartcache", with K per core adding up to a total of 2MB L3 cache. This would be hunky-dory, except for the fact that in very extreme circumstances , there is a bug called the L3 cache Translation Lookup Buffer TLB erratum which can cause a system crash.