The test results show that both the Phenom 9500 and 9600 were disappointments. Graphics performance in PCMark05 was poor, although it was OK in 3DMark Vantage, and the frame rate in Crysis was very low, crawling along at 14-15f/s. This was something of a surprise and we jumped back and forth between B2 and B3 CPUs a few times and the results were consistent.
PCMark05 Results
Longer bars are better
Neither the 9500 nor the 9600 would return a memory latency figure in SiSoft Sandra and neither overclocked by more than the tiniest margin.
COMMENTS
retail prices show AMD quad same prices as Core 2 duo
I have just checked my hardware supplier and see that around the £100 pound mark I can either get:
An Intel Dual Core
or
An AMD Phenom Quad Core
Forget the Mhz speed
Anyone who shells out their £100 for the Dual Core (Intel) when they can get a Quad for the same price (AMD) must be smoking crack!
Gary.
Who is responsible for those charts?
Lets compare the chips at the same clocks speed, 4 bars, that I don't have to spend 5 minutes on each graph.
If you want to test Cool n' Quiet on v. off, do it in a separate test, with one processor.
@AC
As Leo notes in the comments above, he turned the fix off and it made no difference.
Even AMD admits enabling the fix has no impact on B3 performance.
Ground control to the register, do you have shares in Intel?
The whole point of the B3 release is to fix the TLB issue. It is no surprise your results were poor and overclocking barely worked, the TLB fix forces the CPU to read system memory instead of on chip cache! Re-run the test with the "fix" off and then you will see this chip as it was intended!!!!
Thanks
Thanks for the update Leo. I read elsewhere that turning off the B2 fix at motherboard level may be necesary, but depens on your motherboard and in some cases it may be necesary to flash your BIOS with the latest version.
Out of the three or four other reviews I read they managed between 2.8 and 3GHz with a stable system. Personaly I prefer to leave things as they are.
One of the problems I've seen is finding Windows software that I might use and that properly multi-threads (having said which the previous comment seems to imply UT3 might).
Anyway, I've decided to buy a B3 stepped quad core and will run some tests with Apache, Sybase and so on. So, more server oriented tests.
