AMD Phenom X4 9350e and 9950 BE Debut
Our Test Systems and SANDRA
How We Configured Our Test Systems: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set memory timings for either DDR2-1066 (AMD) with 5,5,5,15 timings or DDR3-1333 with 7,7,7,20 timings (Intel). The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows Vista Ultimate was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.
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System 1: Asus P5E3 Premium 2x1GB Corsair DDR3-1800 GeForce 8800 GTX WD740 "Raptor" HD Windows Vista Ultimate |
System 2: Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DQ6 2x1GB Corsair PC2-8500 GeForce 8800 GTX WD740 "Raptor" HD Windows Vista Ultimate |
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We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA XII, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran three of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA XII suite with AMD's new Phenom X4 9950 and X4 9350e processors (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, and Memory Bandwidth). All of the scores reported below were taken with the processors running at their default clock speeds of 2.6GHz and 2.0GHz, with 2GB of DDR2-1066 RAM running in unganged mode.
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SiSoft SANDRA's various benchmark modules reported scores right in-line with logical expectations. The higher-clocked Phenom X4 9950 was faster than any other AMD quad-core CPU and the lower-clocked X4 9350e finished behind the other AMD-based quad-cores, and they both trailed Intel's quad-core offerings by significant amounts in the processor arithmetic and multimedia tests. In the memory bandwidth tests though, the new Phenoms shot to the head of the pack with peak bandwidth of greater than 10GB/s for both.
