AMD Phenom II X4 940 & 920: A True Return to Competition

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• Spoelie - Thursday, January 8, 2009 - link

  Only one little gripe: why was a mid-range motherboard used for the phenom while the intel processors got enthusiast versions?
  
  there IS a difference apparently: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/795/5/">http://www.legitreviews.com/article/795/5/
  
  Not that it would change the conclusions.

• melgross - Thursday, January 8, 2009 - link

  "Not that it would change the conclusions. "
  
  You answered your question yourself.

• duploxxx - Thursday, January 8, 2009 - link

  Nice review, always my firts site to read for a review. A bit basic on oc potential but you hint there is more to come, lets hope we don't have to wait another month like we had to wait for the 790GX board reviews.
  
  I don't see why AMD launched the unicore @1.8ghz.
  
  You are stating that it is because of yields, might be but shanghai launched @2.0-2.2. Phenom2 would scale a lot better performance wise against penryn with a 2,2GHZ NB speed. for sure on the BE part that is a real advantage against the q9400-Q9550
  
  Is this to give the am3+ an additional performance gain when launched? Retail chips hit NB speeds of 2,4-2,6 easy, they also showed up to 3.5-3.6ghz oc on stock vcore, your oc gain was real low, perhaps you show in future oc review what phenom can actually do.
  
  no overview of total system power consumption idle and load?

• ssj4Gogeta - Thursday, January 8, 2009 - link

  Since most of the people have Intel now, it'll take them only a processor upgrade if they decided to buy a better Intel processor. But if they choose to switch to AMD, they'll have to buy the mobo as well.
  
  So for *most* people, getting a Q9400 (or Q9550 if the prices drop) will cost around $270, while getting a Phenom II 940 will cost around $470. And since this is the case for the majority, I don't see Phenom II being price competitive at all.

• RadnorHarkonnen - Thursday, January 8, 2009 - link

  There are more people with AM2+ Motherboards than you can think of.
  They may not spew they writings on the forums or comment actively saying "I'm upgrading!!!".
  
  Units shipped, i would say you r are really short sighted. And the AMD2/AMD3 compatibility is great.
  

• KikassAssassin - Thursday, January 8, 2009 - link

  Yeah, for people building new systems right now who don't want to spend the money on an expensive i7 mobo and DDR3, the Phenom II looks really nice. Intel probably isn't going to make any more LGA775 CPUs, whereas an AM2+ system might have more room for future upgrades with AM3 being backwards compatible.

• melgross - Thursday, January 8, 2009 - link

  But if you do go the i7 route now, you won't have to upgrade for a longer time than if you go with Phenom 1. Overall costs over time will still be lower.

• melgross - Thursday, January 8, 2009 - link

  Oops! meant Phenom 11, or course. Anyway, the higher performance vs the price is worthwhile for many people.

• plonk420 - Thursday, January 8, 2009 - link

  ask Dark Shikari of x264 fame .. i'm sure he could tell you an approximation of Phenom's L3 cache latency... and possibly Phenom II latency soon.

• hameed - Thursday, January 8, 2009 - link

  In the first table here http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...">http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?... the percentages are hard to understand since they need to be flipped (i7 is before Quad) and btw in Cinebench the Quad advantage is 12.8% not 4.8% and the CS4 percentages are also not accurate.