AM3, Easy as 123
Moving to an entirely new socket involves costly testing, design and a lot more testing. Not wanting to head down this route, the Phenom II runs on the AM3 socket - physically identical to the AM2+ socket we use today but with two slots missing. The original AM2+ has 940 pins, while the 938 pins of the AM3 enable something different - they stop the AM2+ chips being used on AM3 (there is no way to get the CPU in the socket, unless you're incredibly disgruntled and have an uncontrollable hammer affliction), while still letting the AM3 chips be used in AM2+.
This means that you don't have to buy an entirely new mobo to get the benefits of Phenom II; instead you simply have to buy the new chip and chuck it in your old AM2+ motherboard (after a quick BIOS flash). But are there any actual benefits to moving to Phenom II over the original, keeping in mind we've established a clear lead over the Athlon 64 chips?
Phenomenally Lacklustre Performance
We'll start the performance part off by mentioning that this CPU starts at a clock speed of 3.2GHz, which is substantially higher than the original Phenom's limit of 2.6GHz stock. Keeping in mind that AMD has claimed it to be a real alternative to Nehalem, what we found was decidedly disappointing.
Stock performance was pretty good, but compared to Nehalem it pales - and compared to a Q8200 the story is even worse. It's got decent latency on the memory (thanks in large part to the DDR3), but the read and write speeds were actually lower than the Q8200! Not only that, but it's also outstripped by far in the overclocking avenues as the highest clockspeed we could squeeze out of this chip on air was 3895MHz. The chip also hit a point where it refused to accept any more voltage for stability, and even did the opposite - refusing to boot and chucking a fit whenever we mentioned anything to it.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012