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Review: When quad-cores collide: AMD Phenom 9600 vs Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600

by Tarinder Sandhu on 19 November 2007, 11:31

Tags: Core 2 Quad Q6600, Phenom X4 9600, Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), AMD (NYSE:AMD), PC

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qakf3

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System setup and notes


System AMD AM2+ system Intel LGA775 system
Processors AMD Phenom '9600' (2.3GHz, 2MiB L2 cache, 2MiB L3 cache, AM2+, quad-core)
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ (3.2GHz, 2MiB L2 cache, AM2, dual-core)
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.40GHz, 8MiB L2 cache, LGA775, quad-core)
Motherboard MSI K9A2 Platinum (AMD 790FX + SB600) ASUS P5E3 Deluxe WiFi-AP @n (Intel X38 + ICH9R)
Memory 4GBytes (4 x 1GiB) Corsair PC8500 Dominator EPP 4GiB (2 x 1GiB) Corsair DDR3-1333
Memory timings and speed 4-4-4-12 @ 800MHz 7-7-7-20 2T @ 1069MHz
Graphics card(s) ATI Radeon HD 3870 512MiB
Disk drive(s) Seagate 160GB SATAII (ST3160812AS)
Optical drive(s) Sony DW-Q30A
BIOS revision VP.0BC (11/08/2007) 0504 (10/09/2007)
Mainboard software Vista pre-installed drivers + AMD AHCI Driver 3.1.1540.11 NVIDIA nForce package 15.01
Graphics driver Catalyst 7.11 BETA (8.43.1-071028a-055060E-ATI)
Operating system Windows Vista Business 64-bit
PSU OCZ GameXStream 700W
Monitor Dell 2405FPW


Software

Benchmarks Sandra XII Lite Win64 float buffered memory-bandwidth
ScienceMark 2.0 32-bit Build 21MAR05 memory latency
CPU-Z v1.41
HEXUS.PiFast
LAME multi-threaded benchmark - 701.5MB file - encoded into 128kbps stereo.
DivX 6.61 (existing DV avi source-file, home-theatre profile, 1700Kbps, insane-quality video, 40Kbps, Stereo, 16KHz Audio)
CINEBENCH R10
POV-Ray 32-bit 3.7.0 BETA 21a - internal benchmark mode
Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts v2.103 DX9
Quake 4 v1.30 - OpenGL
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars v1.1 - OpenGL


Notes

Here is where all the lovely fun starts. We acquired an engineering-sample processor that was coded to the Phenom 9700's clock speed of 2.4GHz. We also noted that it was clocked in with a 4GHz HyperTransport link speed, too. We ran our entire suite of benchmark but had to completely discard them once AMD decided to pull the 9700 model from its line-up at the very last moment.

Now, we've emulated a Phenom 9600 by reducing the multiplier to 11.5x. This in turn automatically disabled Cool'n'Quiet 2.0 and its associated power-saving benefits. Furthermore, with it disabled we see single-threaded performance dramatically increase when compared to C'n'Q-enabled Phenom 9700, to the extent that the pseudo 9600 is faster.

We also note that the MSI motherboard did not support DDR2-1066 memory and, as such, its performance may not be indicative of retail models'. All in all, the numbers you'll see on the following pages are derived from a pre-production CPU running on a non-optimised board but we don't expect the numbers to significantly change once retail samples are tested.