AMD Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition review

AMD's brand-new flagship quad-core processor arrived too late to make it into our processors Labs last month.

It's one of four new models, the others being the 9550, 9650 and 9750. AMD also introduced X4 into the model name, so it's clear how many cores a processor has. Being a Black Edition, the X4 9850 has an unlocked multiplier that allows you to overclock it using the BIOS controls, or AMD's Overdrive utility for Windows.

The X4 9850 has a clock speed of 2.5GHz and, like all Phenoms, it has a memory controller with its own voltage and clock speed, which is independent of the processor speed. The advantage of this is that DDR2 memory runs at its specified frequency. In the X4 9850, the memory controller runs faster than other Phenoms, at 2GHz rather than 1.8GHz. All three levels of cache remain the same.

In our benchmarks, the X4 9850 was quicker than previous Phenoms reviewed, but it still fell short of expectations. It's closest rival is the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600, which is identically priced, but outperformed the X4 9850 in every test. The X4 9850's overall score of 232 doesn't cut it against the Q6600's 250.

Using AMD's Overdrive 2.10, an Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe motherboard and 1GB of Corsair memory, we could overclock the 9850 to 3.1GHz, which boosted the overall score to 272, an increase of 17 per cent. The multitasking score shot up to 241, and video-editing performance was a few per cent faster than a stock Q6600.

If you're happy to get your hands dirty overclocking a new processor and you own an AMD AM2 or AM2+ motherboard that supports Phenoms, this is great value. If you have a Socket 775 motherboard supporting a 1,333MHz FSB, try a discounted Q6600, since it's about to be discontinued.

Author: Jim Martin