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Review: AMD Phenom X4 9850: Phenom fixed, but not phenomenal

by Parm Mann on 18 April 2008, 08:48

Tags: Phenom X4, Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition, Phenom X4 9600, Dell (NASDAQ:DELL), Gigabyte (TPE:2376), ASUSTeK (TPE:2357), Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), AMD (NYSE:AMD), OCZ (NASDAQ:OCZ), Corsair, FSP Group (TPE:3015), PC

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qamli

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Multithreaded performance

It isn't looking good. Our Phenom 9600 review showed late last year that Intel's non-native architecture leaves Phenom in its wake when handling dual-threaded WAV encoding and frankly, that hasn't changed.

So, the Phenom X4 9850 BE doesn't look good on single-threaded or dual-threaded tests. Well, here are a few tests that'll utilise all four cores on each processor, unfortunately, it's more of the same for AMD.

Another benchmark heavy on all four cores is CINEBENCH R10 64-bit, one of few benchmarks to show AMD's Phenom X4 9850 BE in a better light - putting it closer than ever to Intel's Q6600.

The third multi-core benchmark, POV-Ray, tells us more of the same. If you haven't caught on just yet, our tests show that the Phenom X4 9850 BE has the beating of its Phenom X4 siblings, but can't match the performance of Intel's Core 2 Quad in either single-threaded or multi-threaded benchmarks.