Phenom 2 X4 940 Black Edition

By sora3
14:13 Jul 10, 2009

Good overclocking room
Drop-in upgrade for AM2+ users
Still relatively inexpensive if compared to the Q9550/Q9400

Still not as great as the Core 2
Speed is still slower than the Core 2
AM3 means no instant drop in AM3 boards
Need a good AM2+ board to bring out the full potential of it
End of Line now...

Most Intel fans would rather forget the Pentium 4 era in which Intel's CPU were practically smacked silly by AMD's Athlon64 series. Back then, it was a triumph for competition and as well as innovation. However, with this defeat in mind, Intel came back stronger and released the Core 2 which is still the undisputed king today. AMD was back to the same stool it occupied for so long. Even their trumped Phenom was a dud. It was hot, ran slower than the Q6600 (the quad core king then) and as well as overclocked poorly than Gates telling everyone we didn't need more than 640KB of memory.

Most AMD fans jumped ship and even the most ardent fans were wondering if this was the end of AMD. With more defeats than ever, AMD released the Phenom II 940 Black Edition. Now, this usually will be met with 'So what?' and back to overclocking the bejesus out of the Core 2s. But it's not that simple.

Underneath the IHS, we see that a new core has been made. 45nm, 6MB of Lv3 cache and as well as a new top clock speed of 3GHz. Sounds good, right? But don't be fooled as this is only the beginning. The words Black Edition means that this CPU has an unlocked multiplier. Meaning, that you can ramp the clock speed higher without having to touch the HTT. Just ramp it higher = higher clockspeed.

With decent air cooling, the CPU managed to hit 3.8GHz on my motherboard of a Gigabyte MA790GP-DS4H. Not bad for a relatively untested 45nm process by AMD. But as I compared my result with the others, it seemed so...pale. If you look, most Core 2 can easily hit 4.0GHz or above with no sweat. Having a 3.8GHz seems so puny or laughable even. However, considering that the previous Phenom could only clock to 2.7GHz max with a load of swearing and cussing in between, it seemed such a large gap. SuperPi was a measy 19 sec overclocked compared to the near 10 sec times the Core 2s were at.

In comparison the Cores, this isn't really a sledgehammer AMD needed to knock the attention off the Core i7 or the Core 2s. But I don't care. I want competition and I want to cheer for the underdog. And this proves it. All I can say is 'Welcome back, AMD'.

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Atomic Magazine

Issue: 133 | February, 2012

Atomic is a magazine aimed squarely at computer enthusiasts, gamers, and serious PC upgraders.

Every month we bring you the latest reviews of new technology and PC components, in depth features on everything from overclocking to console hacking, and gaming previews and interviews.

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