X4 940 black edition

These quad core processors will eventually completely replace the existing Phenom series and, for the foreseeable future, be AMDs answer to Intels new Phenom II is a huge improvement over the first two generations of Phenom processors. It provides far better performance, lower power consumption and lower operating temperatures. Phenom II is not what the Radeon was for ATI but it is an excellent processor which makes AMD the most competitive they've been in years and beats Intel's previous architecture Penryn at times clock for clock.

Phenom II is a real By ITP. Think again. AMD's Cool'n'Quiet 3. Now the cores can shut down unused parts of the processor when not in use. This saves power and helps to reduce the amount of heat generated. This function is built in so there's no need for drivers or BIOS updates. With Quad-Core technology, four complete processor cores on a single die run at the same frequency to deliver exceptional multi-tasking power, allowing users to surge through the most demanding processing loads, including advanced multitasking, critical business productivity, complicated visual design and modeling, serious gaming, and visually stunning digital media and entertainment.

The integrated memory controller changes the way the processor accesses main memory, resulting in increased bandwidth, reduced memory latencies, and enhanced processor performance.

HyperTransport Technology HyperTransport Technology HT or HTT is a high-speed, low latency, point-to-point link designed to increase communication speeds between integrated circuits in computers, servers, embedded systems, and networking and telecommunications equipment. In a simple example, a quad-core die with a faulty core can still be modified and sold as a triple-core model.

The following table lists all available Phenom II X4 quad-core processors:. AMD processors still employ Hyper Transport to link to the system chipset, and they still include a dual-channel memory controller.

This yields chips that consume less power and produce less heat than the equivalent designs on the older process, which means CPUs can either run at the same speed as before but consume less power or run faster for the same power usage. Another result of the shrink is either an increase in the number of chips that can be produced per wafer of silicon making them cheaper or that the same number of chips can be produced with more logic crammed into the same space.

A large proportion of this extra silicon is taken up by an increased amount of on-die cache memory. However, the third L3 level has increased from 2MB all the way up to 6MB, which is shared by all four cores.

AMD estimates this accounts for around a five per cent performance increase over previous Phenoms. That said, a number of tweaks have been made to both increase performance and reduce power usage. The previous incarnation would dynamically clock each core independently, which in theory sounds great but because of the way Windows Vista handles the distribution of tasks across multi-core processors, it could result in reduced performance. Another power saving improvement comes from the new ability of idle cores to flush out the contents of its L1 and L2 caches remember these are normally only readable by one core to L3 cache which the other cores can read.

The processor can then halt clocks to the idle core and consequently save power. As for those under the bonnet performance increases, AMD was actually relatively tight-lipped about most of them, simply claiming that when combined they added an extra three per cent to the overall performance improvement.

After all, you buy a CPU based on the end result, not how and why it got there. Two versions of Phenom II will eventually be available.

However, these are industry standard benchmarks that we feel people value, as they can easily be downloaded and run by anyone. However, the simple fact of the matter is, if you have a powerful gaming PC, CPU performance is not going to be your bottleneck. Both games use scripting to run through a custom time demo, with frame rates recorded along the way.

Each setting is run three times and an average taken to ensure a consistent and fair result. The QX would probably have just crept ahead in this otherwise largely graphics card limited situation.

Again, AMD fails to take top spot in this benchmark but it has made some significant gains, particularly in the higher resolution test.