First Looks: AMD Phenom equipped PC

 

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Posted on 22 Feb 2008 at 17:18

Intel's Core 2 range of processors have been used by the vast majority of award-winning PCs in Computer Shopper over the past year. However, Intel's competitor AMD has just launched its Phenom range, which it hopes will challenge the current dominance of Core 2.

The Phenom is AMD's first true quad-core processor, as the Athlon Quad FX range consisted of a pair of dual-core processors on a single chip.

We've tested one of the first PCs to come equipped with a Phenom processor: CyberPower's Gamer Ultra 950. It has a 2.2GHz Phenom 9500 processor and 2GB of RAM, but costs a mere £750 inc VAT. It scored a swift 378 in our video encoding test, 171 in our image editing test and 194 in our multiple applications test. Its overall score was 214.

For comparison we looked at Mesh's similarly priced G92 Pulse Pro (reviewed in What's New, Shopper 241), which uses a 3.0GHz Core 2 Duo E6850 processor. It was slower in our multi-threaded video encoding test with a score of 305, as the E6850 is dual core rather than quad core. But it scored 245 in our image editing test and 285 in our multiple applications test, for an overall score of 240.

The Phenom 9500 processor is clearly fast, especially with applications that take advantage of multiple cores, but for most applications the Intel-powered PC proved better value for money.

However, with time AMD will surely release faster processors based on the new design. While Intel is currently launching its new E8000 series of Core 2 Duo processors and Q9000 series of Core 2 Quad processors, both of which we'll be testing in Shopper 244. This latest competition between Intel and AMD should benefit the consumer.

For our full verdict on CyberPower's Gamer Ultra 950 and the Phenom 9500 processor, check out Computer Shopper 243.

Author: Alan Lu