AMD Phenom II X4 940 and 920 CPUs

Test Setup

Here is a list of the applications we've used for our testing - most of them are available free for public consumption, although some are popular professional software applications. In all cases, the benchmarks were run three times and until a consistent set of results were achieved and the data presented here are averages of those results.

• Sisoft Sandra 2009 SP1
  
• Lavalys Everest 4.6.1540
  
• Crysis v1.21
  
• Far Cry 2
  
• Half-Life 2: Episode Two
  
• PCMark Vantage x64
  
• WinRAR 3.71
  
• 7-Zip
  
• Paint.NET 3.20
  
• Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 8
  
• DivX 6.8
  
• AutoMKV 0.97.1
  
• Cinebench 10 x64

Following demand from the bit-tech community, we have included 7-Zip as well as WinRAR in our benchmarks as it is another popular, free, file compression tool. We have also introduced two new video encoding tools - the popular Sony's Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 8 and the latest version of AutoMKV: 0.97.1. Combined, these video encoding applications include either a mix of multi and single threading, or consistently heavy multithreading and cover a range of video transcoding techniques from .VOB to x.264 and raw .MTS to WMV9.

On the gaming front, we have introduced Far Cry 2 in addition to Crysis and Half-Life 2: Episode Two to give us a wide range of game engines that cover the latest, greatest and most popular corners of the PC gaming industry. The common ground of Windows Vista x64 with Service Pack 1 gives both the latest version of DirectX as well as 64-bit computing, which benefits a few applications as well as allowing us to address more than 4GB of system memory.

Test Setup

Supplemental Hardware

Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce GTX 280
Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 160GB SATA II
Power Supply: PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750W
Memory: Corsair Dominator XMS2-8500 5-5-5-15, G.Skill Pi-series F3-12800Cl7D-4GBPI, Qimonda PC3-8500U-7-XX-A0
Drivers: Nvidia GeForce 178.13, Intel inf 8.6.1.1001 and 9.1.0.1007
Operating System: Windows Vista Home Premium x64 SP1

CPU Prices: Where to the Phenom IIs fit?

At the current MSRP of $275, the Phenom II 940 slots between Intel's Core 2 Quad Q9550 at $316 and the Q9400 at $266. It's very close to the Core i7 920 which Intel sells tray of a thousand CPUs for $284 - but when we consider the platform cost the Phenom II is considerably cheaper.

The Phenom II 920 on the other hand has an MSRP of $235, which puts it closer to the Q8300 which Intel sells for $224 (but unfortunately we didn't have one to test against).