Review: AMD Phenom™ X4 9850 "Black Edition"

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Test Results - Synthetic

PCMark05, like all of Futuremark’s benchmark suites, is made up of a series of tests designed to stress specific subsystems, such as hard drive, processor, or memory performance. SimHQ decided to use just the CPU suite and the total score for this article.

The X4 9850 shows substantial gains over the slower 9600, but both Phenoms are outperformed by the Intel part by a significant margin.

3DMark06's two CPU tests were used since both are heavily threaded.

These two CPU tests show the Q9450 posting much higher scores than the Phenom CPUs, with the X4 9850 falling comfortably in the middle between the three tested parts.

Test Results - Real World

Windows Media Encoder 9 was used for SimHQ’s content creation test. The application is a free download from Microsoft and is heavily threaded. Falcon 4: Allied Force’s intro movie, a 91MB .avi file, was converted into a .wmv file with high definition video and audio settings and the total time required by each processor to convert the file recorded. Shorter conversion times represent a better score for this particular test.

AMD’s quad cores fare somewhat better here than with the Futuremark products, with the X4 9850 finishing the job only a half-minute behind the Intel part.

Moving onto the fun stuff, Microsoft’s FSX Acceleration, the first retail expansion to FSX, was recently released and has continued to display very CPU-limited performance characteristics.  An Airtrike Ultralight was flown over Rio de Janeiro on a clear afternoon at roughly 5k elevation using a recorded free flight.

The X4 9850’s 200MHz clock increase over the 9600 gives it a roughly 10% performance lead under both test settings, yet the Q9450 again outperforms the two Phenoms to a noteworthy degree.

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