AMD 2.3GHz Phenom 9600 – first benchmarks

Posted at: 2:47am 22nd November 2007 by Ben Hardwidge

Is AMD’s new native quad core processor phenomenal enough to beat Intel’s Core 2 Quad? ...

AMD’s made a big gamble with its quad-core processors; not only have they turned up over a year after Intel’s first Core 2 Quad chips, but they’ve also given them the chancy name of Phenom, which is short for ‘phenomenal.’ This is fine, of course, if Phenom turns out to be phenomenally fast, but it’s conversely going to result in a lot of AMD jokes and sniping if it’s phenomenally rubbish.

Which will it be? Well, you’re about to find out, as we’ve now run our first benchmarks on a 2.3GHz Phenom 9600 in the labs. At this point, it’s worth pointing out that Phenom was originally going to be launched in three flavours, with the 2.4GHz 9700 at the top of the range. However, there have apparently been problems with the transition look up buffer (TLB) in the Level 3 cache of the 9700, because of the extra load at the higher clock speed, which means that the 9700 won’t be launched until AMD has a fix for the problem.

As such, this means that the 9600 is at the top of the pile, and it’s currently retailing for £199.74 inc VAT. Intel’s nearest equivalent in terms of price is the Core 2 Quad Q6600, which costs £166.84 inc VAT from the same retailer, meaning that the Phenom 9600 needs to be a fair bit quicker to be worth choosing over the Intel chip.

Unfortunately, though, the Phenom 9600 failed to keep up with the Q6600 in any of our tests. The biggest disappointment was in the multitasking test, where the Q6600 scored 967 compared with the Phenom 9600’s score of 627. However, the Phenom was significantly behind in our other tests too, with the multi-threaded video encoding test a good 242 points behind the Q6600, and the single-threaded image editing test being 164 points behind. Even our Supreme Commander gaming benchmark lagged on the Phenom, with the minimum dropping to 8fps, and the average dropping to 35fps.

Of course, we’ve yet to try overclocking the Phenom yet, but it’s going to be tough for the chip to compete with the incredible overclocking headroom of Intel’s Q6600 with G0 stepping. We still have some more tests to run on the Phenom, but based on what we’ve seen so far, it’s a huge disappointment, costing significantly more than Intel’s Core 2 Quad 6600, but delivering much less in terms of speed. Phenom is going to need to drop significantly in price to make it worth considering over Intel’s equivalent.