Yesterday AMD launched the new B3 stepping Phenoms, along with the world’s first tri-core processors. Since then a number of reviews of the new Phenom 9850 Black Edition have appeared. The figures prove that there have been no architectural changes, but also that none of the fixes have improved performance. At the same time, we’re terribly disappointed by the fact that the overclocking is still anything but impressive. Only one of the review was actually able to achieve 3.0GHz stable with air cooling.
The 20% higher frequency resulted in 25% better performance though, which makes us wonder what a high frequency would result in. Unfortunately, we will probably never, we will still try though. This is still better than what they were able to do with Phenom 9600 Black Edition, but still not good enough, in terms of competition.
The power consumption, which is suppose to be a trademark of AMD, is not much different from that of the competing 65nm processors from Intel. If you bring 45nm parts into the equation, it’s just no fun for AMD anymore.
Price will be the key here, and knowing that Intel will be pricing its coming Q9000 models in the +$200 range, AMD will have a niche in the sub-$200 range. Performance isn’t bad, but when you bring overclocking, even longterm, into the picture, it gets hard to recommend a Phenom.
:: TechReport :: LegitReviews :: Sharky Extreme :: HotHardware :: Anandtech :: Xbitlabs :: FiringSquad :: Hardware.info ::
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