| AMD Phenom-II X4-980 BE Processor |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Processors | |
| Written by Hank Tolman | |
| Monday, 02 May 2011 | |
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Testing and ResultsBefore I begin any benchmarking or overclocking, I thoroughly stress the CPU and memory by running Prime95 on all available cores, normally for 12 hours. In this review I stressed them for 6 hours. If no errors are found, I move on to a gaming stress test. To do this, I use Prime95 again to stress the processor, while running an instance of FurMark's stability test on top of this. If the computer survives this test for 2 hours without lockup or corruption, I consider it to be stable and ready for overclocking. After achieving what I feel is stable overclock, I run to these tests again for certainty. The goal of this stress testing is to ensure the clock speeds and settings are stable before performing any benchmarks. I adopted this method from another writer here at Benchmark Reviews and it seems to do a great job of flushing out what only seem to be stable overclocks.
Once the hardware is prepared, we begin our testing. Each benchmark test program begins after a system restart, and the very first result for every test will be ignored since it often only caches the test. This process proves extremely important in many gaming benchmarks, as the first run serves to cache maps allowing subsequent tests to perform much better than the first. Each test is completed five times, with the average results displayed in our article. The Phenom-II X4-980BE will become the most expensive and fastest AMD quad-core processor available. Set to release at an MSRP of $195, the Phenom-II X4-980BE competes directly with the Intel Core i5-2500 Sandy Bridge processor clocked at 3.3GHz. We have tested the Phenom-II X4-980BE against the Core i5-2500. Let's take a look at the results. (Prices are from NewEgg.com as of 5/2/11.)Intel H67 Test Platforms
Intel X58 Test Platform
AMD 890GX Test Platform
Benchmark Applications
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Comments
Your so called test is FAR from a real world experience.
By tha way my processor is Phenom II X3 720BE works rock solid 3.6GHz
Major running tasks include 2 Minecraft servers, a daily (at 12pm) backup from one hard drive to 2 others (Acronis Backup & Restore 10), AVG Business Pro in the background and a Minecraft render (renders an overview map to a Google Maps interface) every hour.
I will occasionally run the Minecraft client & FRAPS together on the same machine.
This is on older generation (socket 940) gear so... maybe I'm not quite mainstream real-world, but I would consider game+AV+video convert as not /too/ far removed from the kind of workload I would put my AMD system through.
My current system copes beautifully, by the way. It would just be nice to see how modern hardware performs.
Throwing 2 or 3 'big' tasks at a system is the only way to know how well it really performs. CPU's have generally been 'fast enough' for 2 years. The only consumer-level task bottlenecked by CPU power is video converting and, really, how many consumers actually do that?
Gaming is limited by GPU and just about everything else gets stuck trickling through a SATA cable or wobbling around in a mostly circular fashion on a hard disk platter, waiting patiently for a read/write head to give it some attention.
So, can a system cope with playing Battlefield whilst your iPod video conversion, Torrent download, CD audio rip and BOINC job is running? Inquiring minds want to know.
Phenom II x4 965BE is now available for $120. The rest of the line seems to be similarly discounted around the web as well. I'm sure that AMD has a plan but wonder why the price point isn't more in line with moving silicon as a commodity at this late stage of the Phenom family tree.
-Hank