AMD's Phenom X4 9950, 9350e and 9150e: Lower Prices, Voltage Tricks and Strange Behavior
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Gary Key on July 1, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
More Problems?
The Phenom’s flaky Cool'n'Quiet performance in some of our benchmarks forced us to test with it disabled, unfortunately with it disabled we ran into another problem: stability.
Gary originally wrote about this in his Postcards from the Edge blog. Many mainstream motherboards ship with low cost 3-phase power delivery circuitry, which is unfortunately insufficient to handle the current draw of AMD’s very high end 125W and 140W TDP processors. Despite the problems Gary initially encountered with many early boards (both AMD and Intel platforms), many manufacturers continue to certify 125W processors like the Phenom X4 9850 BE on their mainstream boards.
While it’s unlikely that a user would drop a 9850 into a 780G motherboard, it is possible that someone would take a Phenom X4 9550 and attempt to overclock it too far on a 780G - resulting in the same problems.
With Cool'n'Quiet enabled, our power load on our testbed Gigabyte 780G was just fine - the motherboard had no problems uneventfully completing our entire test suite. However, with CnQ disabled as we had to do in order to get the best performance results out of Phenom our 780G board was noticeably less stable. While it completed most tests without issue, we couldn't complete a run of Windows Media Encoder 9 without cooling the power delivery circuitry on the motherboard. A simple case fan did the trick:
The Cool'n'Quiet issues we encountered clearly have much further reaching implications than erratic performance in a few benchmarks.
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Regs - Tuesday, July 1, 2008 - link
Between cool n' quite and flimsy power management, it just seems like AMD overshot their goals. Though to me, it seems like they could easily be fixed in Shanghai, but that's if they can keep all four cores busy instead I have 3 cores at stall, and one pumping at max in threaded or shared instruction instances. This will though cause more power consumption, and I think you guys all ready said that mobo support is just not their to power these suckers. You can have your cake, you just cant eat it.What do you goes think about AMD at 2.6 GHz? Looks more competitive stacked up to Intel's finniest at the given price point. Just makes me wonder if the over complicated power management features are keeping AMD from hitting 3.0 GHz or above. What do you think is holding AMD back?
DigitalFreak - Tuesday, July 1, 2008 - link
Shitty engineering?Griswold - Wednesday, July 2, 2008 - link
Well, I dont know for sure. But its definitely not moronic comments from dumbasses such as you.Assimilator1 - Tuesday, July 1, 2008 - link
Yeah it looks like they've messed up the clock speeds for the lower Phenoms too, lol.Aries1470 - Tuesday, July 1, 2008 - link
Hi,Just found the following strange:
AMD Phenom X4 9850 $205
AMD Phenom X4 9750 $215
The slower one is more expensive, while in the article it has the prices reversed?
"The new Phenom X4 9950 will occupy the $235 space, which will push the 9850 down to $215. The Phenom 9750 will go away temporarily to make room for the new chips at the high end, leaving the 9650 at $195 and the 9550 at $175."
I wonder which one is correct ;-) Hmm... I think a proof reader and an eye for detail is needed :-)
Ok, now for me to read the rest of the article.
Btw, any update on the new VIA Nano CPU - Codename Isaiah? Will there be a review? It is as fast as a 9150e or faster at the same clock speed? It has much less power usage. Now if someone over here could do a review or get more info that would be great, since it is like there is no other x86 competitor out there...
That's all from me.
Gary Key - Tuesday, July 1, 2008 - link
The 9750 pricing will not be changed by AMD officially and thankfully that model is being phased out in the retail sector and replaced by the 9850BE.I have a picture of the VIA Nano PR flag from Computex and a handout explaining how it should perform. That is about as far as VIA is willing to go at this point with information. I did hear from some OEMS that VIA was not even close to getting the CPU out this summer as originally thought, much less advanced reviews. However, we do push them on an almost daily basis for it.