Review of Phenom 9600 BE & 9900

[thilanliyan]

http://www.lostcircuits.com/cpu/amd_phenom/

Doesn't look too bad for Phenom. Their conclusion is pretty interesting.

 

[v8envy]

Am I the only one whose brain is boggling at the 'green' overdrive setting being the most unstable one?

Software based overclocking would be the *LAST* thing on my mind when qualifying a processor/platform for use in production. And I'm sure I'm not alone there. So the default configuration of 'crashy' is what a good portion of potential Phenom adopters would see during qualification. Not good.

Interesting guess re: the instability being caused by extra stress placed on the memory controller by the BIOS patch. Wonder what other crash-inducing bugs are lurking within.

 

[GuitarDaddy]

The patch seems pretty stupid, the likelyhood that the errata would effect you is miniscule. But the patch is a certain bummer:thumbsdown:

If you've got absolutely mission critical data and are scared of the errata, use something else.

 

[SickBeast]

If the Phenom didn't have the errata bug, I would be interested in one at $200.

They should actually do ok in the new year if they can work the bug out quickly enough, and ramp up the clockspeed a bit.

Hopefully they can last long enough to produce Fusion...that chip looks seriously interesting.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: GuitarDaddy
The patch seems pretty stupid, the likelyhood that the errata would effect you is miniscule. But the patch is a certain bummer:thumbsdown:

If you've got absolutely mission critical data and are scared of the errata, use something else.

Photoshop is pretty widely used.

 

[Sylvanas]

Good review for sure, it shows we really need software to catch up to the hardware and start producing multi-threaded apps, lots of potential going to waste as shown in the UT3 benchmark where Phenom topped the lot!

 

[GuitarDaddy]

Originally posted by: Acanthus

Originally posted by: GuitarDaddy
The patch seems pretty stupid, the likelyhood that the errata would effect you is miniscule. But the patch is a certain bummer:thumbsdown:

If you've got absolutely mission critical data and are scared of the errata, use something else.

Photoshop is pretty widely used.

Did I miss the memo?

Is the errata causing problems in Photoshop?

 

[CTho9305]

Originally posted by: GuitarDaddy

Originally posted by: Acanthus

Originally posted by: GuitarDaddy
The patch seems pretty stupid, the likelyhood that the errata would effect you is miniscule. But the patch is a certain bummer:thumbsdown:

If you've got absolutely mission critical data and are scared of the errata, use something else.

Photoshop is pretty widely used.

Did I miss the memo?

Is the errata causing problems in Photoshop?

One of the review sites said they had Photoshop issues, but Tech Report couldn't reproduce it with or without the BIOS patch. If the site that had trouble did re-test with up-to-date motherboards, I didn't see it. I think people just guessed it was the TLB issue because they don't really understand the billions of different things that could go wrong. For all we know, the reviewer had a flaky power supply or bad RAM or something. Maybe they touched the CPU pins after walking across carpet while wearing socks. IMO, there's too many ways to break hardware for a consumer/end-user to really tell what's happening.

Other people speculated that issues that arose when OCing were TLB-related, but I couldn't figure out how they came to that conclusion. As far as I could tell, people experiencing the TLB issue should encounter BSODs with a specific message (machine check exception, and a specific error code), but I didn't see any reports of that in reviews... there's a discussion thread on the x86-64 mailing list that has details.

 

[Phynaz]

Originally posted by: GuitarDaddy
The patch seems pretty stupid, the likelyhood that the errata would effect you is miniscule

But yet the chance is high enough that AMD will not sell you a cpu without testing your application first.

Who do I beleive?