To test the AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE I will be using the same test machine that I used with the Phenom II 940 back at the beginning of the year with the exception of changing out the mainboard for a Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P socket AM3 board supporting DDR3 RAM. I am also using 4GB of Corsair DDR3 RAM in the machine. Since my test rig runs Windows Vista 32-bit, I don’t get the benefit of all that RAM though.
The new AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE carries a clock speed of 3.2GHz making it one of the highest clocked AMD CPUs ever offered. The CPU fits its performance into a 125-watt thermal envelope. As with all of AMD's Black Edition CPUs the AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE is multiplier unlocked and ready for overclockers to go at it. We aren’t big on overclocking at I4U, but if that is your thing the AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE will do it.
The MSRP of the processor we will be looking at here today is $245, making it dead cheap compared to the high-end Intel Core i7 parts. Admittedly the AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE isn’t near the performance capability of the high-end Intel parts and despite being AMD's top of the line it is more on par with mid-range Intel pars in performance and price. The AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE is more of a mid-range beast for the gamer looking for performance with a very close eye on the cost. With the right components you could build a complete computer based on the AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE for the cost of a high-end Intel CPU alone.
Now I will get into the benchmarks for the processor. I will be using 3DMark Vantage, 3DMark06, Cinebench 9.5 and 10, and well as one Sandra 2009 test. I had hoped to do several more benchmarks from Sandra 2009, but the application simply refused to run and was the only benchmark of my group that would lock the test machine up. It appears to be some sort of issue with Sandra 2009 and my test machine that is unrelated to the CPU.
3DMark06 is a test typically associated with video cards, but it does offer a nice CPU benchmark that gives a good idea of how well a CPU performs. Just for completeness, I will give the GPU results as well that are based on a HD 4850 video card in my test machine. The AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE system scored 1334 total 3DMarks, SM2 was 5117, HDR was 5931 and the CPU score was 4463. To compare the Phenom II X4 940 BE I tested had a CPU score of 4219 and an Intel QX9770 I tested last year had a CPU score of 4520.The 955 comes very close to the performance of the much more expensive QX9770 in this test.
I have only recently started to use 3DMArk Vantage in my test suite so I don’t have numbers to compare yet. The AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE had a CPU score of 10901 on the benchmark and CPU test 1 scored 1406.38, and CPU test 2 scored 17.01 Steps/s. The total 3DMark Vantage score for the system was P7742.
Next up was Cinebench 9.5 and Cinebench 10. On Cinebench 9.5 the AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE scored 1622 CB-CPU and on Cinebench 10 it scored 10638 CB-CPU. The Phenom II 940 scored 1569 CB-CPU on Cinebench 9.5 and 9757 CB-CPU on Cinebench 10. We can see that the new 955 offers more performance compared to the 940 for sure.
The final test for the AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE was Sandra 2009. I had planned to run the entire CPU benchmark suite on the processor, but all Sandra benchmarks except for the Processor Arithmetic benchmark refused to run on my test machine. On the processor arithmetic benchmark the AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE scored as follows:
- Aggregate Arithmetic- 42.78 GOP
- Dhrystone ALU- 43.43 Gips
- Whetstone iSSE3- 42.13 GFlops
