AMD Phenom 9600 Black Edition Tested

Occasionally I get these emails from TechwareLabs, it's like an up and coming version of the good old days of Tom's Hardware Guide, anyways, they take various gadgets and pieces of hardware and put them through their paces, this time they had an AMD Phenom 9600 Black Edition. They started out running it as is, out of the box, and comparing it to the Intel QX6600 and E6550, it didn't go so well.

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First off, the Phenom is a Quad-Core processor, and throughout the whole article they were hyping up the benefits of Phenom and Spyder platforms and all this other garbage, but in the end there was but one test that I saw in the article where the Phenom bested the QX6600, and it wasn't in gaming. Really, when you hype up the benefits of a new AMD processor as much as they did, and then a mediocre dual-core Intel processor beats it in any test, you should probably stop writing that article, that's right, there was a test they did where the E6550, a dual-core processor, beat out the Quad-Core Phenom 9600 Black Edition by more than 10 frames per second, because the test it beat the Phenom on was Gaming.

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So, all of you AMD enthusiasts that are gamers that were putting your eggs in the Phenom basket hoping for that to be the savior of your beloved AMD, I'm going to have to say its time to pack up your eggs and go crying back to Intel for forgiveness. Oh, and one more thing, since it was a Black Edition processor, that means it didn't have any set multipliers, basically it was built for overclocking, so they tried that too, and found that a 2.3GHz Phenom Black Edition seemed to cap out at 2.6GHz regardless of heating issues, they said that even at 2.6GHz they were within the heat range and that they tried going higher, and they just couldn't, even with bios upgrades and all that jazz, they couldn't get above 2.6GHz, almost like there was a cap of some sort, so, its not really for overclockers either.

[via techwarelabs]

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