Conclusions

Taking the professional score into account, all Phenom II processors look very attractive.

We should say a few words about such an important characteristic as overclocking. We didn't have that much time to analyze this issue in full detail. But even brief tests gave so interesting results that we decided to publish them here.

The 3.7GHz line was crossedeasily, our processor was stable under load with its voltage increased only to 1.44 V (recommended maximum with air cooling is 1.55 V for this stepping). Multipliers for the integrated Northbridge and HT bus were set to x9. So CPU NB operated at imposing 2.5 GHz. It's an excellent result!

In case of the triple-core processor, we decided to set its voltage to maximum and use the unlocked multiplier to determine its maximum stable clock rate. It was 3.9 GHz. It should be noted again that these are approximate results. By the way, we obtained them on different motherboards -- the triple-core processor was tested on Gigabyte MA790GP-UD4H, which offers more powerful power circuits and better cooling than the one used in our main testbed.

We can conclude that Phenom II processors demonstrate more attractive performance than their direct competitors from the Core 2 series. For example, the 810 processor looks much better than the Q8200 and the Q6600, which has a much larger cache. Phenom II X3 has a significant advantage -- the third core. So it's a more promising product, demonstrating no worse, or even better performance in most tests. In fact, this processor makes dual-core CPUs justified only in the budget category, which lacks triple-core models, or in case of some specific tasks.

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