AMD Phenom II X4 940 & 920 Processors

Product Summary & Final Conclusions:

These Phenom IIs have proved themselves as worthy competitors to similarly priced Intel chips like the Q9400 & Q9300. Performance was really a juggle in the scientific & overall system tests. Intel still came out on top in gaming, but keep in mind that was at low resolutions & settings. Higher quality settings in games will be almost entirely dependent on your video card.

Overall though it looks like AMD has a solid product to compete with the mid-range Intel quad core chips. Unfortunately these are the fastest AMD chips and they still can't compete with Intel's higher-end models, but AMD's don't cost $1,000 a pop either. These new processors deliver affordable performance for AMD systems.

With AM3 Phenom IIs just around the corner it is tough to say how popular the Phenom II X4 940 & X4 920 chips will be since they are only AM2+ compatible. For people with existing AM2+ systems that want a boost, then an X4 940 or X4 920 would be the way to go. People wanting to build new systems might hold off to wait and see what AM3 processors and motherboards will be priced at (and the performance difference).

A pleasant surprise is how much lower power consumption is compared to the previous 65nm Phenoms. Less power means cooler temperatures, and in turn means easier overclocking (usually).

Overclocking was a *little* lower than what I had expected, I was hoping for a couple hundred more MHz on both air & phase. But after seeing the benchmarks and running the system for a while I'm quite pleased with the performance where it stands now. It will be interesting to see what consumer results are when these chips hit the retail channels, maybe that magical 4 GHz on air (stable) is still possible.

There's still the hard reality that many Intel chips will reach that 3.8 - 4.2 GHz range on air (for both dual & quad chips). As we have seen in the benchmarks, AMD's performance is a little lower clock-for-clock. Just messing with my Q9550 (while waiting for SYSmark to complete on the X4 940) I managed a solid 3.83 GHz with a Zalman 9700 using a hair under 1.3v. The only thing holding me back there was the heat, reaching a scorching 75C under InteBurnTest. Intel has had their 45nm fabrication going for a while and tweaked their process, I'm sure AMD will be doing the same and we will hopefully be seeing some higher overclocks.