AMD Phenom X4 9850 B3 Revision

We ran a handful processors and platforms, including the new Phenom X4 9850, through Futuremark’s latest system performance metric built especially for Windows Vista, PCMark Vantage. PCMark Vantage runs through a host of different usage scenarios to simulate different types of workloads including High Definition TV and movie playback and manipulation, gaming, image editing and manipulation, music compression, communications, and productivity.  Most of the tests are multi-threaded as well, so the tests can exploit the additional resources offered by a quad-core CPU.

From this point forward in this article, we'll be comparing the performance of the new AMD Phenom X4 9850 processor to a couple of Intel quad-core processors and a trio of other Phenom configurations.  To get as close to an apples to apples comparison between the B3 and B2 revision of Phenom, we overclocked a Phenom 9600 Black Edition to 2.5GHz and ran it though our benchmark suite with the TLB patch both enabled and disabled.

As you can see, the new Phenom X4 9850 is clearly AMD's fastest CPU to date.  It significantly outpaces the Phenom 9600 and is as fast of faster than a B2 revision chip, clock for clock. The Phenom X4 9850 also outpaces the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 in a majority of the tests here, which bodes well for the Phenom considering its lower price point.