AMD Phenom II X4 940 & 920: A True Return to Competition

SYSMark 2007

Our journey starts with SYSMark 2007, the only all-encompassing performance suite in our review today. The idea here is simple: one benchmark to indicate the overall performance of your machine.

AMD hasn’t done too well under SYSMark 2007, especially with Phenom - it was just never competitive. There were even murmurs of AMD complaining about its poor performance under SYSMark 2007 not too long ago. The complaints never went anywhere because Phenom II addressed the shortcomings. SYSMark 2007 favors larger caches and the original Phenom left its cores cache-starved. With 1.5MB of L3 cache per core, Phenom II now offers the same performance as its closest cost competitors under SYSMark 2007.

The Phenom II X4 940 gets the exact same score as the Core 2 Quad Q9400. The Phenom II X4 920 equals the performance of the Q9300, which is actually a bit more expensive than AMD’s proposed price. If the two were competing against the Q9550 and Q9400, respectively, AMD would go back to trailing Penryn.

The older Phenom processors are mostly worthless here - Intel’s Core 2 Quad Q6600 outperforms the Phenom X4 9950 by 8%, and that’s with CnQ disabled. Turn on CnQ and the performance gap grows to a noticeable 25%. One of the biggest advantages of Phenom II is that you can have CnQ enabled without the painful performance impact.

It’s worth pointing out the sort of performance you can get out of a high frequency dual-core CPU here. The Core 2 Duo E8600 is a bit expensive for a dual-core, priced at $266, but it offers the same performance as the Core 2 Quad Q9650. The more affordable Core 2 Duo E8400 runs at 3.0GHz, priced at $166, and outperforms all sub-2.66GHz quad-core Core 2 chips. While a quad-core will last you longer, if you are a frequent upgrader it’s worth paying attention to the dual-core market. An E8400 today, followed by a mainstream Nehalem next year, could be your path to performance enlightenment.