Enter The Dragon: AMD Phenom II X4 940
Our Test Systems and SiSoft 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: 2x2GB Corsair PC2-8500 GeForce GTX 280 WD150 "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 six of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA XII suite with AMD's new Phenom II X4 940 processor (CPU Arithmetic, CPU Multimedia, Multi-Core Efficiency, Memory Bandwidth, Cache and Memory Bandwidth, and Memory Latency). All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor running its default clock speeds of 3.0GHz, with 4GB of DDR2-1066 RAM running in unganged mode.
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The various SiSoft SANDRA tests we ran paint the Phenom II X4 940 in a somewhat favorable light. The chip was the fastest of all of the AMD-based systems by bar, and it held its own against the similarly clocked, Penryn-based Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650, although the Q9650 was faster overall. The Core i7-based systems simply extended the lead held by the Core 2 Quads.
In the memory bandwidth tests, the Phenom II X4 940 offered up 12GB/s of bandwidth with DDR2-1066 memory attached. It's going to be interesting to see how that numbers changes when the DDR3-enabled AM3 editions of these processors are released later this year, with potentially higher frequencies.
