AMD Phenom 9900 Review

Author: William Henning
Editor: Howard Ha
Publish Date: Wednesday, December 19th, 2007
Originally Published on Neoseeker (http://www.neoseeker.com)
Article Link: http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/phenom_9900/
Copyright Neo Era Media, Inc. - please do not redistribute or use for commercial purposes.

Phenom 9900: 2.6GHz quad core from AMD - can it take on Core 2 Quad's head to head?

We published our Phenom 9600 review at the end of November; but in this industry, nothing stands still. Since then, AMD has been kind enough to send us a Phenom 9900 reviewer's kit, and today, we will see how it stacks up.

The kit included:

• Phenom 9900 2.6GHz Quad Core Processor
• AMD heatpipe heatsink (same as before)
• Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe Motherboard
• a pair of Corsair Dominator PC2-8500 5-5-5-15 modules

For our stock speed testing, we used the kit as it was sent to us, however for our overclocking tests, we switched to a Noctua NH-U 12, one of our favorite CPU coolers.

If you've read our Phenom 9600 Review, you will remember that I reviewed it from the perspective of someone who might want to upgrade an existing AM2 dual core system - and I found it to be a decent upgrade.

With the speed increase to 2.6GHz I decided to compare the Phenom 9900 to the previously reviewed Phenom 9600, and to two Intel quad core processors at their stock speeds.

1. The Core 2 Quad QX6700 runs at 2.66GHz at stock speed, and I suspect that AMD will price the Phenom 9900 below the QX6700's current $949 price tag.
2. The Xeon X3210 runs at 2.13GHz at stock speed, and is an excellent performer, currently selling for $247
3. update: A reader pointed out that the Core 2 Quad E6700 running at 2.66GHz is available for $560

According to the rumour mill, the Phenom 9900 may be priced around the $350 mark - which while above the Xeon X3210's price, is WELL below the price of the QX6700.

As everyone knows, AMD has had difficulties with launcing the Phenom; it launched about six months after it was supposed to, at well below the originally announced 2.8GHz - 3GHz launch speeds.

On top of that, shortly after release news of the TLB erratum was spread far and wide. AMD was able to issue a microcode update that works around the problem, albeit with a reported 10%-20% performance hit, and AMD also released a patch to the Linux kernel that allows it to work around the problem while reportedly taking only a roughly 1% performance hit - one hopes that Microsoft will release a similar hotfix for XP and Vista.

Now that we have a B2 stepping of the Phenom 9900 to test (yes, it has the TLB bug) let's see how it compares to both a less expensive 2.13GHz Xeon X3210 and a more expensive, basically same clock rate, Core 2 Quad Extreme QX6700!

The Asus M3A32-MVP is one of the latest Socket AM2 boards from Asus, and it features the new AMD 790FX chipset, however as this review is a processor review, we will only take a look at this fine board.

As you can see the board has heatpipe cooling of the chipset, and a total of FOUR GPU slots!

If you have two GPU's, you can give each one full PCIe 2.0 16x capability, however if you have four GPU's - which would be somewhat excessive for 99.99% of users - you need to drop to merely PCIe 2.0 8x speeds... but you should remember that a PCIe 2.0 8x slot has the same bandwidth as an earlier PCIe 16x slot, so you are hardly short changed.

Plenty of solid state capacitors, 8+2 phase power, support for Hypertransport 3.0, DDR2-1066 support, CrossFire support and HD Audio round out this board.

Here is the full spec sheet on the board, straight from asus.com:

In order to keep the testing as fair as possible, we will use the following test platforms:

Socket AM2:

• AMD Phenom 9600 (on MSI K9A2 CF)
• AMD Phenom 9900 (on Asus M3A32-MVP)
• AMD stock CPU cooler
• Noctua NH-U 12 cooler
• Corsair PC2-8500 memory @ 4-4-4-12/2T
• XFX GeForce 7800 GT
• Corsair HX620W power supply

LGA 775: (please read the processor review to see which exact board it was tested on)

• Core 2 Quad Xeon X3210
• Core 2 Quad QX6700
• Asus P5W DH Deluxe motherboard
• Gigabyte GA-P35T-DQ6 motherboard
• Corsair PC2-8500 memory @ 4-4-4-12/2T
• XFX GeForce 7800 GT

 ASUS' M2N32-SLI motherboard is an excellent performer, and allows us to try very high FSB speeds.

Naturally, we also used a high-end 975X-based motherboard for our LGA775 benchmarking. In this case it was the ASUS P5B-E Premium -- a favourite of ours here. 

Software used during testing consisted of the following:

• Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2
• NVIDIA ForceWare 84.21 drivers
• CineBench 2003
• LAME MP3 Encoding
• PC Magazine Business Winstone 2004
• PC Magazine Multimedia Content Creation 2004
• POV-Ray 3.7 beta 13
• RightMark Memory Analyzer
• SiSoft Sandra
• TMPGEnc MPEG2 Encoding
• WinRAR
• Call of Duty
• Comanche 4
• Doom 3
• Far Cry
• Halo
• Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• World In Conflict

Please note that we are showing overclocked results in all the charts - we are not holding you in suspense until the end of the article. :-) The chart labels incorporate a lot of information about the test configuration. The first line shows the socket type and the model of the processor. Since all the processors shown are dual-core devices, we did not specify that on the charts.

The second line shows the "FSB/HT clock rate" x "CPU multiplier" followed by the effective memory speed. All DDR2 tests were run at 4-4-4-12 timings unless otherwise specified.

Business Winstone

At stock speeds, the Phenom 9900 manages to slighly beath the Core 2 Quad QX6700, and the Xeon X3210 is clobbered.

Content Creation

At stock speed the Phenom 9900 beats the QX6700 and the X3210 by approx. 10%

Sandra CPU Benchmark

The Phenom 9900 is slightly slower than the Xeon X3210 for integer code, however it ends up noticably faster than the Xeon for floating point code!

The QX6700 results are unfortunately not directly comparable, as they were obtained with an earlier version of Sandra.

Sandra Memory Bandwidth

The Phenom 9900 clobbers both the Xeon X3210 and the QX6700 for memory bandwidth!

WinRAR MT

Once again, the Phenom 9900 beats both the X3210 and the QX6700.

RightMark Read

The AMD Phenom 9900 handily beats both quad core Intel chips for RightMark Read at stock speed.

RightMark Write

What can I say? The Phenom 9900 beats the QX6700 and X3210 again.

RightMark Latency

Well, we can hardly be surprised that the Phenom 9900's on-chip memory controller beats the Intel chip's off-chip memory controller when it comes to latency.

RightMark Bandwidth

Hmmm... a clear pattern is emerging. For memory bound tests, the Phenom 9900 beats the Xeon X3210 and the Core 2 Quad Extreme QX6700.

Lame

The Phenom 9900 is soundly beaten by the QX6700, however it beats the X3210.

TMPGEnc

The Phenom 9900 is slightly beaten by the X3210, and more so by the Core 2 Quad QX6700.

CineBench

At stock speeds, the QX6700 beats the Phenom 9900, which in turn beats the X3120.

Pov-Ray

At stock speeds, the AMD Phenom 9900 is beaten by both the QX6700 and the X3210 here

Call of Duty

The Phenom 9900 beats the Xeon X3210, but is handily beaten by the QX6700 for this test.

Commanche 4

The Phenom 9900 handily beats the Xeon X3210, and basically ties the QX6700!

Doom 3

The Phenom 9900 slightly beats the Xeon X3210, and is spanked by the QX6700 for Doom 3.

Halo

Once again, the Phenom 9900 slightly edges out the X3210, and is badly beaten by the QX6700 here.

Jedi Knight

The pattern continues. The Phenom 9900 edges out the X3210, and is soundly beaten by the QX6700.

UT2004

Same story as above.

World In Conflict

As you can see from both the chart and the table below, World In Conflict scales a bit - but only a bit - with processor speed at 800x600 very low detail only. The higher resolution results are within experimental error of each other, so that tells us that World In Conflict is VERY GPU limited.

Given a good enough GPU, the Phenom 9900 will run World In Conflict well enough.

Power Consumption

The Phenom 9900 is not exactly a miser when it comes to power consumption - the Xeon X3210 uses quite a bit less juice.

Unfortunately we don't have power consumption figures for the QX6700.

Overclocking

After the problems AMD has had in getting higher speed grades of the Phenom to market, I was initially worried about the overclockability of the Phenom 9900. It is less than three weeks since the release of the Phenom 9600, and I could only overclock our Phenom 9600 to 2.645GHz!

Fortunately it looks like the Phenom 9900 AMD sent us is a newer stepping - B2 to be precise - and even though it is not the fabled B3 stepping that will fix TLB erratum, it does seem to have opened up some extra "elbow" room.

How much?

How does a stable 3.0GHz strike you?

Mind you, I had to replace the stock AMD cooler with its sticky heatsink compound with a Noctua 12 and Arctic Silver - but that dropped the CPU temperature by a whopping 15'C when idling at 3GHz!

In order to run at 3GHz, I did the following:

• left the FSB at 200MHz
• set the multiplier to 15X
• raised Vcore to 1.5V
• set the DRAM voltage to 2.1V
• set the CPU to NB voltage to 1.42V
• used a Noctua 12 with Arctic Silver

I also tried to overclock with the HT speed, however I could not get even 233x13 stable on this Asus M3A32-MVP.

Conclusion

I was actually quite pleased with the performance of the Phenom 9900.

Given AMD's public commitment to fixing the TLB errata, and their move to 45nm with the "K10.5" architecture (Barcelona with some additional improvements) I suspect that AMD will be more competitive on the high end sometime next year.

But even until then... looking at the benchmarks, it did not seem like the Phenom 9900 was that far behind - if it was in fact behind.

The table below shows the relative rank of the three processors in the results for each benchmark - one means best result, two means second best, and third means last. These rankings are based purely on stock performance, as that is how the vast majority of people run their systems.

That is a very interesting result.

The Phenom 9900 generally took first place in business applications and memory oriented benchmarks - sometime with quite a margin.

The Phenom consistently beat the Xeon X3210 for the gaming tests, and was generally trounced by the much more expensive QX6700 (DUH).

Now if we end up the rankings... we see that over the whole set of benchmarks the Phenom 9900 was not far behind the QX6700 in the number of first place finishes!

Moral of the story:

The Phenom 9900 running at 2.66GHz DEFINITELY outperforms a Xeon X3210 running at 2.13GHz - as it should.

For gaming, at unrealistically low resolutions for todays gamers, the QX6700 badly beats the Phenom 9900 - but no one really games at those resolutions, and as World In Conflict shows, modern games are GPU not CPU bound.

Frankly, the Phenom 9900 did much better against the QX6700 than I had expected. Now if the BIOS on the motherboard allowed finer grained control over memory speed settings, I might have been able to squeeze even more performance out of the chip at both stock and overclocked settings; but a future BIOS revision may well take care of that.

AMD needs the 45nm shrink badly. It will address the power consumption issue - there is no question that Intel quad core processors are "greener" right now - and when that is combined with the purported architectural enhancements, and the ability to ramp up the clock speed due to lower voltage 45nm designs generating less heat, Intel may again have some real competition for the high end next year.

But you know what?

The consumer wins already. If aggressively priced, the Phenom 9900 - and upcoming lower end "Black Edition" Phenom's - will present an excellent value proposition to consumers, and provide a very viable alternative in the low and mid-range markets.

»Neoseeker.com

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