First Look: AMD Phenom II

As a new year begins, the seemingly age-old processor war moves on.

On Wednesday, Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE:AMD) (AMD) is launching its first line of CPUs built with 45 nm technology. Dubbed the Phenom II, the pair of quad-core processors are the 3.0GHz X4 940 Black Edition and the 2.8GHz X4 920. The Test Center got a pre-release unit of the X4 940 and ran it through our standard tests to see how it stands up.

The Phenom II is considered the heart of AMD's newly announced Dragon platform, which also consists of ATI Radeon HD 4800 series graphics (AMD acquired ATI in 2006), AMD 7-series chipsets and AMD software. The goal of Dragon is to enable computers for high-definition gaming, video processing and entertainment at an affordable price.

The X4 940 carries AMD's traditional Black Edition moniker, which signifies its unlocked multiplier. As such, this will likely make it popular among the overclocking community. Keeping the latest AM2+ form factor, the new processors will be backward compatible with most current motherboards, although a BIOS update will most likely be needed.

Major feature enhancements include an 8 MB total cache (L2+L3) and additional power states that provide a lower power idle and lower power consumption under moderate load when used with the company's Cool'n'Quiet 3.0 Technology (enabled via the BIOS).

Our test system consisted of an NZXT chassis and PSU, with the X4 940 installed into an MSI DKA790GX Platinum motherboard and 4 GB of Kingston Technologies ValueRAM memory. We decided to stick with the motherboard's integrated Radeon HD 3300 GPU to focus on the capabilities of the processor.

After installing Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 and all the necessary drivers, and updating the OS with the latest patches, we ran the latest version of Primate Labs' benchmarking program Geekbench2, which returned a respectable score of 5,477. Since this is a Black Edition processor, reviewers then decided to do some minor overclocking to see how far we could push the X4 940. Using only a heatsink and fan for cooling, we focused primarily on the FSB frequency, slowly increasing the setting, and rebooting after each change to run Geekbench2 again. This allowed us to track performance gains, while at the same time putting the system under a load to check for stability.

As is usually the case, eventually the blue screens started appearing and we had to throttle back a little to get the OS steady again. In the end, we were able to bump the clock up to 3.50GHz and achieve a Geekbench2 score of 6,392. Were it not forIntel (NSDQ: INTC) (NSDQ:INTC)'s latest Core i7 models built on the Nehalem microarchitecture, this would have been the highest score the Test Center had seen for a desktop system. In the near future, we intend to resume overclocking the X4 940 a little more aggressively, with the addition of liquid cooling.

Of course, it really isn't fair to compare the Phenom II to the Core i7. Although their stock processor speeds are similar, the Core i7 is priced significantly higher.

Additionally, it brings with it a list of necessities, such as a new motherboard and DDR3 memory with specific voltage requirements. This essentially means you need a whole new system.

At the end of the day, both companies have their loyal fan base that will argue to the death why one is better than the other. What it basically comes down to is a balance between price and performance. Although a new system built around Nehalem will probably be the top performer, it will cost you. With the Phenom II and AMD's Dragon platform, a powerful system can be built for a relatively lower price.

At $275 and $235 respectively (priced in 1KU quantities), the X4 920 and X4 940 are great options for those with fairly new AMD-based computers who would like to upgrade to the latest processor. They also allow system builders and VARs to upgrade their standard models without adding a whole new list of SKUs to their inventory.