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World In Conflict

YIKES!

The TLB fix causes an incredible 42FPS performance loss in the Minimum FPS of World In Conflict with the Phenom 9600 Black Edition - you read it right, the TLB fix drops the minimum performance by greater than 50%.

The Average performance "only" drops by 20%, and the Maximum performance drops by 35%.

If you like World In Conflict, DISABLE THE TLB FIX!

Ouch.

Overclocking

Unfortunately the Phenom 9600 Black Edition is not a great overclocker. How far was I able to exceed its stock 2.3GHz?

On the MSI K9A2 Platinum I was unable to get it stable even at 2.6GHz (13x200) - possibly due to not being able to use our Noctua 12 cooler and having to use an AMD stock heatsink.

On the Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe I was able to run at 2.6GHz without any problems with the Noctua-12 - as long as I increased Vcore to 1.4V; but I simply could not get the system stable at 2.7GHz.

Basically, the unlocked Phenom 9600 Black Edition let me run it at the Phenom 9900's stock speed, but no higher. I am looking forward to getting my hands on a B3 stepping of the Phenom to see if that will overclock better - in the past, new steppings often ran at higher clocks than previous iterations of a chip as the manufacturers keep tweaking their processes.

Conclusion

I was not expecting miracles from the Phenom 9600 Black Edition - I did not expect it to be as great an overclocker as the Athlon X2 5000+ Black Edition as that chip is a mature product.

I was very interested in finding out how badly the microcode based "fix" for the TLB erratom impacted the performance of the processor, and the results look pretty bleak for enthusiasts.

For business use, the performance hit ranges from 5-7% for office applications, to a whopping 66% for WinRAR.

MP3 encoding takes a 1%-4% hit; video conversion 10% or so, and 3D rendering 10%-30%.

Synthetic memory and processor benchmarks are not affected greatly by the TLB fix.

In the games that we tested, performance takes a 2%-53% (ok, 52.5% to be more accurate) hit, with the average speed loss being around 14%.

If I were you, I'd simply disable the fix. For most personal use, the low risk of occasionally hanging Windows due to the TLB erratum is not worth the significant performance hit you will incurr by enabling the microcode based fix. I really doubt that the TLB issue would significantly increase the number of crashes you would otherwise experience anyway due to software errors. I personally did not experience any crashes in testing on stock speeds with the fix turned off.

AMD is apparently currently testing the B3 stepping of the Phenom, and it is hoped that this stepping will fix the TLB erratum so that the microcode fix will no longer be needed. Rumours are that this fix could be available this March or April.

For server use, I'd simply use the Linux kernel patches that AMD has made that work around the issue with a very small performance loss; frankly, Microsoft should really release hotfixes for their operating systems with a similar patch; then the slow microcode based fix would be history.

Is the Phenom 9600 Black Edition worth it?

Well, its the same price as the regular Phenom 9600, so if you were going to get a Phenom 9600, you may as well get the Black Edition for some relatively painless overclocking to Phenom 9900 levels without having to increase FSB speeds.