AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Review

3D Media Creation

This is not something I do personally, but I know a lot of people are into 3D rendering at home. To test 3D rendering performance, we make use of Maxon’s CineBench program.

Based on Maxon’s animation software, Cinema 4D, CineBench is a good real-world benchmark that makes comparing systems easier for those of us who aren’t really familiar with creating 3D art. Cinema 4D was used to make such movies as Spiderman and Star Wars. Good enough for me!

We have also added 3ds Max, which is probably the most popular rendering software around. Finally, to round things out, we have POV-Ray, a totally free ray tracing tool. POV-Ray has a built-in benchmark which measures in pixels processed per second.

Pretty much the same story here – X4 955 and Q9550 perform similarly, both to be crushed by the far more advanced Core i7 920.

And again… This time the X4 955 looks especially strong against the Q9550. Too bad for AMD, the Core i7 exists.

As we found in our Nehalem review, the Core i7 doesn’t perform especially well in POV-Ray just yet. So this time, the scores are pretty tight.

Math

Yeah I know, we already looked at the ‘pure math’ results on the first page of this review. But sometimes math calculation in itself works in practical PC usage. Back in the day, the most popular program for overclockers to show off their e-peen was SuperPi. Unfortunately though, that program is not multi-threaded. So to take its place, we have wPrime. wPrime actually has absolutely nothing to do with prime numbers – what it does is calculate the square root of really large numbers (upwards of 32 billion at this point). Total calculation time is given in seconds. If more than one core is detected, the test is split into several threads.

Both the X4 945 and 955 look quite impressive against the Q9550 in this test. Unfortunately, both are dominated by the Core i7. Again.

WinRAR

We like to include an archiving benchmark, since after all, who doesn’t use archives on their machine? WinRar features an integrated benchmark utility, but note that the results themselves are not real-world in that it measures decompression/compression throughput directly. Other factors will make differences between systems less pronounced, but this does a good job of singling out CPU performance.

Ouch (again).

Overclocking

Since the X4 955 is a Black Edition CPU, overclocking is as easy as increasing the multiplier setting as high as you want. You could also make it as advanced as you want, by increasing the CPU voltage and adding a high performance cooler. Since timings aren’t touched, there is no reason to buy expensive overclocking memory – everything will remain in spec, other than the CPU speed. This is an awesome feature, and is one of the reasons AMD remained a favourite for many people over the past couple years despite their inferior processors.

On our test system, which was an Asus M3A78-T with a Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme, I was able to overclock the X4 955 to 3.8 GHz at 1.45v. This was stable enough to pass our stress tests (it would boot into Windows at up to 4 GHz, but would inevitably crash during stress testing), and is very impressive for “free” performance.

Keep in mind that overclocking results will vary, and your particular CPU is not guaranteed to be stable at this speed.

Conclusion

Well one thing is for sure – AMD didn’t forget how to make a great CPU! Quite the opposite actually – with the Phenom II, they have created a processor that not only hangs with competetively priced Core 2 Quad models, but beats them in many scenarios.

Unfortunately for AMD, it might just be a case of “too little, too late” at least in this price range, and at least for people building from scratch. As we discovered at the beginning of this review, if you are building a brand new system (motherboard, video card, etc) it only costs about $120 more to build a Core i7 920 system (which is just a 10% increase over the Phenom II and Core 2 Quad’s budgets).

One major advantage going for the Phenom II is the fact that it will work on a huge variety of motherboards. Everything from AM3, to AM2+, even to some AM2 boards. If you already have an AM2+ system with some fast DDR2 memory, you are just one step away from having significantly increased performance – even better than the Q9550 that way probably way too expensive when you bought your Phenom 1.

So AMD is back, but not exactly taking names. Not in the $250-300 price range at least.