Memory Performance:

We've had to opt to use the latest version of Sisoft Sandra XII SP1 for testing, because the current version of Everest doesn't support Phenom properly. Instead of loading all the cores, Everest 4.2 only loads a single core (instead of all cores) when using Phenom and thus reports lower-than-expected performance.


As expected, the Phenoms obliterate everything else in dual channel memory mode, however the usual performance increase we see from the older Athlon 64 X2 isn't there according to Sandra. One thing that's worth mentioning here is that there is a difference between ganged and unganged memory modes -- we have investigated this later on in the review.


Interestingly, Phenom's memory latency results were rather unexpected, as we're normally used to the integrated memory controller reducing memory latency. This is probably down to the L3 cache being an extra high-speed data storage pool, meaning that it takes longer for data to actually reach the memory.