AMD Phenom II X4: 45nm Benchmarked

Features
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Prices

Prices for the Phenom II fall into a fairly narrow range. For lots of 1,000, AMD will sell a Phenom II X4 940 running at 3.0 GHz for about $275 each, while the 200 MHz slower Phenom II X4 920 goes for $235 per unit. We also compared system costs for AMD and Intel builds as well.

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SystemAMD Phenom IIIntel Core i7Intel Core 2 Quad
ProcessorPhenom X4 940:  $275 Core i7 920:  $300 Core 2 Quad Q6600: $190
MotherboardMSI DKA790GX: $130 Asus P6T: $249Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P: $135
RAMG.SKILL 4GB: $49 G.SKILL 6GB: $144 G.SKILL 4GB: $49
Overall$454$693$374

A comparable Core 2 Quad Q6600 system from Intel costs about $80 less than a Phenom II system. But the Core i7 is no competition to the Phenom II in this price segment, thanks to the i7’s tri-channel DDR3 RAM and its still fairly expensive motherboards.

Bert Toepelt
164 Comments Comment from the forums
  • one-shot
    YAY!, The day has come! Haven't read it yet. I am excited to see what it brings!
    Reply
  • firedogevan
    why focus on the q6600... wouldn't the q9550 or 9650 be a more accurate comparison given their respective locations in the product lineup?
    Reply
  • dechy
    Yeah, the price comparison table should of included a Q9550, which costs same as i7 920 but with the lower mobo/ram combo price.

    Ends up being the same price as the AMD bundle, but with a good more performance... there goes the whole "AMD price/performance" aspect of this chip.
    Reply
  • one-shot
    Great review. Maybe some overclocking later? There were some pretty high claims about its overclocking potential. I'll wait for AM3 before I retire my E6750.
    Reply
  • cangelini
    Coming up soon one-shot--I was working on that one =)
    Reply
  • V3NOM
    who cares about performance/watt? PRICE/PERFORMANCE is the big deal
    Reply
  • The Q9xxx series would trump the PhenomII in all the categories listed above. THG, it was downright *criminal* to have not included the Yorkfield chips in your performance per dollar and performance per watt analysis.
    Reply
  • nashville
    hey bert/tom's:
    good write up: thought id comment on i7 watts:
    "we measured the power consumption directly from the 12 volt rail that supplied the CPU", i read somewhere the only i7 core logic gets power from 12v rail, the uncore/cache part somewhere else. if this is true, you going to do another measurements?
    Reply
  • kirvinb
    I'm so happy to see Intel has some competetion. While these new processors are not mind blowing, they offer some decent performance at the price given. I am sure this will lower the price of the q9400 and q9550, which is exactly what I want to see. Maybe even the i7s price will lower and maybe we will be back in the good days..where intel and amd flipped sides of the powerhouse like every 6 months..!! Good Write Up..
    Reply
  • jj463rd
    On the forums someone mentioned "why did they use DDR2-800 RAM when DDR2-1066 would give better performance for the Phenom II".Wouldn't this skew the benchmarks by a little bit (perhaps 2 to 3%)?
    Reply