AMD Phenom vs. Athlon Core Shootout

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Test Components & Test Experience

AMD Phenom 9900 at 2.6 GHz

We used a Phenom 9000 CPU and set it to 2.6 GHz clock speed, which resembles that of model 9900. Since the BIOS of our test motherboard doesn't allow us to switch off individual cores, we forced Windows to run as a single processor system, using only a single core. We did the same thing with the Athlon 64 X2 6000+ after setting it to 2.6 GHz as well. This meant that the Phenom should have the full advantage of its features in a direct apples to apples comparison against the Athlon 64 X2.

CPU-Z 1.42 didn't work on our test system, so we had to step back to version 1.41.

Four cores, 4x 512 kB L2 cache, 2048 kB L3 cache and 600 million transistors.

Patrick Schmid
Patrick Schmid
Editor-in-Chief (2005-2006)

Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.