PCGH: Phenom performance at X4, X3 and X2 dissected

AMDs native quad core processor Phenom finally has arrived and since their triple core siblings are yet to be release PCGH has taken a full-fledge Phenom X4 and analysed its performance with not only four but also three and even two cores to compare it to an A64 X2 with 2,3 GHz.


All AMD CPUs were tested on the same plattform running at a core clock of 2.3 GHz - the fastest at which you'll be able to buy them right now. Obviously, the C2Q processor didn't run on the same setup, instead we used an X38-board with the same memory configuration compared to the AMD setup. Further details on the test systems can be found right inside the individual benchmarks. We used an GF8800 Ultra for displaying the 2D-Images.

• Winrar
• 3DMark06 (CPU-Score)
• Cinebench 10

Our benchmarks show that the Phenom with only two cores activated outperforms it's ancestor by a small margin. This seems to be due to architectural improvements, except for the larger gain of almost 19 percent in WinRAR - here the integration of the 2 MiByte sized L3-Cache really shows and its the only test where the Phenom (with four cores) can marginally outperform even Intels Q6600 running at 2,4 GHz.

Strangely enough, the Phenom X3 is almost at the heels of the fully-fledged X4 Phenom. Probably most of today's tests do not utilize a quadcore processor to the fullest, making a linear performance scaling with increasing number of cores a future dream to come true.