Top Model With Four Cores - AMD Phenom 9700

Translation: The Spider Spins It's Web.

Today marks a historic occasion for AMD. After delays of more than a year, the company can finally present its new, highly anticipated processor - and not a moment too soon. AMD needs a fresh product. While this CPU was originally meant as a competitor to Intel's Core 2 CPUs, the balance of power in the CPU arena has shifted over the past 18 months. The new processor, dubbed Phenom by AMD, is the first quad-core CPU by AMD and, as the company likes to remind us, the first native quad-core design.

The exhaustion in the faces of our editors in the Munich lab is a testament to the hard work they've put into this article over the past few hours and days. We tested all three models of the new processor, the Phenom 9700, Phenom 9600 and Phenom 9500 , running each of them through our benchmark suite. Compare Prices on AMD Phenom Processors Along with the Phenom processor, AMD is also presenting its "AMD OverDrive" tool.

With the new 7-series chipset family, consisting of the 790FX, 790X and 770, AMD is simultaneously unveiling the Spider platform. Up to four graphics cards can be set up as a Crossfire X configuration using the new 790FX chipset.

All of the current and the new motherboards and processors are fully compatible with one another.

Looking towards Eastern Europe: For the actual introduction of its Phenom processor, AMD invited the press to the Polish capital of Warsaw, where the company held a three-day press conference.

Jochen Polster, manager of AMD Germany, opened the event with a keynote addressing the press. For the first time since the acquisition of graphics chip company ATI, AMD is presenting a complete platform consisting of the Phenom processor, the 790FX chipset and the HD3800 graphics card series. With this platform, code named Spider, AMD aims to offer the basis for a computer that is affordable for everyone.

Jochen Polster emphasised that the Phenom quad-core processor does not represent a high-end model for now. AMD plans to price the Phenom models markedly lower than Intel's quad-core models.

The gaming market has always been a driving force in PC sales. With the 790FX chipset, AMD now offers buyers the possibility of creating a system using up to four graphics cards in a crossfire configuration. The appropriate driver is expected for release in January 2008.

Since we already covered the HD3800 series of graphics cards in a separate launch article, we will concentrate exclusively on the Phenom quad-core processor and the new 790FX chipset in this article.

AMD's Phenom processors - our test candidates today.

Join our discussion on this article!

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  1. 1 – Top Model With Four Cores - AMD Phenom 9700
  2. 2 – The Phenom In Detail - A Revamped Athlon 64
  3. 3 – Technology I - Advanced Memory Prefetcher, SSE4a
  4. 4 – Technology II - Branch Prediction, Stack Counter
  5. 5 – Technology III - Virtualisation, L3-Cache, HTT 3.0
  6. 6 – Direct AMD Comparison - Phenom And Athlon X2
  7. 7 – Phenom - Models
  8. 8 – Phenom Caught A Processor Bug - Remembering The Pentium 60
  9. 9 – Overclocking - Still An Engineering Sample?
  10. 10 – Phenom Fits In Every Socket
  11. 11 – Cool'n'Quiet 2.0
  12. 12 – Cool'n'Quiet 2.0 In Detail
  13. 13 – Cool'n'Quiet 2.0 In Detail II
  14. 14 – Power Dissipation - No Reliable Data
  15. 15 – Core Voltage - Lowered To 1.2 Volts
  16. 16 – Chipsets - The Spider Platform
  17. 17 – AMD's Chipsets - 790FX, 790X And 770
  18. 18 – AMD Boards By MSI, Gigabyte And Asus
  19. 19 – Reaching 3.00 GHZ With AMD's OverDrive Utility
  20. 20 – Pricing - Phenom 9600 For $279
  21. 21 – Athlon 64 X2 6400+ Beats Phenom 9600
  22. 22 – Phenom 13.5% Slower Than Intel's Q6600
  23. 23 – Test Setup
  24. 24 – Software Configuration
  25. 25 – 3D Games - UT2004, Prey
  26. 26 – 3D Games - Quake 4, Warhammer
  27. 27 – 3D Games - Supreme Commander, Serious Sam 2
  28. 28 – 3D-Rendering - Cinema 4D, 3D-Studio Max
  29. 29 – Applications - AVG, WinRAR
  30. 30 – Applications - Photoshop, PDF
  31. 31 – Applications - Deep Fritz
  32. 32 – Audio Encoding - ITunes, Lame
  33. 33 – Synthetic - Sandra CPU
  34. 34 – Synthetic - Sandra Memory
  35. 35 – Synthetic - Sandra Multimedia
  36. 36 – Synthetic - PC-Mark
  37. 37 – Synthetic - 3D-Mark
  38. 38 – Video Encoding - Xvid, Pinnacle Studio
  39. 39 – Video Encoding - Premiere, Mainconcept
  40. 40 – Video Encoding - HDTV, DivX
  41. 41 – Video Encoding - CloneDVD
  42. 42 – Slower, But Cheaper Than Intel's Smallest Quad-Core
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