Phenom 9350E Review

The only area we found that the 9350e was beneficial was for a home theatre PC, and even then in just a single instance after using the right codec. The CoreAVC codec is highly threaded and so takes advantage of the extra resources available on the 9350e, compared to the faster clocked dual-core 4850e, which was unable to handle a 1080p MKV all on its own. However, if it's possible, moving some of the load onto the GPU is still yet again more attractive and more energy efficient.

With Media Player Classic - Home Cinema edition set to use the GPU, the 4850e was decidedly overpowered now. We realise not everything can be offloaded onto the GPU - it has to conform to some sort of standard at least. The Phenom X4 9350e is stuck between a rock and a hard place in that respect. The Phenoms need clock speed to get competitive with what else is on offer, but in this instance, AMD has gone the other way and underclocked the 9350e instead. What's also stopping you from just underclocking and undervolting any other Phenom like the 9550?

AMD claims the 9350e is "perfect for the Home Theatre PC, small form factor PCs and anywhere companies or consumers want a multi-tasking machine that is energy efficient and inexpensive", but exactly how good is it? Does a higher clocked 65W or 45W dual-core offer a better performance than four cores that are clocked lower? From our experience with the Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 (and lower), we found that a faster dual-core is often more beneficial - especially in gaming.
US Price (as reviewed): Around $220 (ex. Tax)

AMD Phenom X4 9950 & 9350e Review -part 3-

Same trends with Cinebench 10.
Again with Pov-RAY AMD just can't compete with the 9300 though it is $40 more expensive.Good scores here overall from AMD.
Valve's benchmarks give us very similar results.

Update: We re-ran some tests using Cinebench 10 as the benchmark with a Radeon HD 4870 for power consumption. Finally let's look at power consumption.

	Phenom 9350e	Phenom 9950 BE
Idle	195	225
Load	213	275

The Phenom 9350e has excellent power ratings for a quad core just barely hitting 200W on the 780a. We didn't have time to test on a 780G but it should be much lower load consumption at around 150W so for home theater PCs or other low power machines the combination of the 780G and 9350e or 9150e is unbeatable. For a 140W TDP for the 9950 it also doesn't draw too much more power.

AMD Phenom X4 9950 & 9350e Review -part 2-

We used Asus' Crosshair II Formula 780a motherboard for overclocking using the Zero Therm NV120. Not adjusting the voltage we were able to hit 3GHz stable, a new high for Phenoms, but adjusting the voltage to 1.425v we were able to hit 3.2GHz stable and reach 3.3GHz though it blue screened in 3DMark. This was a 600MHz stable overclock, the best yet for AMD's Phenom.

Trying to overclock the low wattage 9350e didn't fair as well moving only from 2GHz to 2.34GHz despite increasing the voltage heavily.

Here's our current test system.

Mother Board	Asus Crosshair II Formula
CPU	Various
Video Card	Asus 9600 GT Top
Memory	Corsair XMS Dominator 2GB
Hard	Western Digital Raptor
=Case	Tsunami Thermaltake
Display	Samsung 20" LCD Westinghouse W4207

Our test OS was Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 with nForce driver revisions 175.19 and chipset driver revision of 18.11. V-sync was disabled for graphic tests.

For our games testing we used lower graphic settings in order to stress the processor and relieve the graphics card from being the bottleneck.

UT3 shows the 9950 as a great competitor with the more expensive Intel Q9300.

Unsurprisingly the 9950 isn't too far from the 9850 in Crysis. The Intel Q9300 comes out on top here.

Not too many shocks here in 3DMark 2006 but the 9950 does over 100 points more than the 9850.

AMD Phenom X4 9950 & 9350e Review -part 1-

ATI has been on a roll lately starting with the Radeon 3870 last year, the 780G earlier this year, Puma, and the Radeon 4850 and 4870 which swept the rug out from under Nvidia and beat them handily in price and performance as well as adding on extra features. The question remains though for AMD's CPU division, when will they start flourishing as they did not so long ago now. Can the Intel goliath be toppled again? I can tell you now with the two new processors AMD is releasing today they aren't going to knock Intel off the top but are three new processors they are releasing today to add to the line: the Phenom X4 9950, 9350e, and 9150e.

Model	CPU Freq.	MC & HT(x2) Freq.	Max TDP	Core Count	Price
X4 9950 Black Edition	2.6GHz	2.0GHz	140W	4	$235
X4 9350e	2.0GHz	1.8GHz	65W	4	$195
X4 9150e	1.8GHz	1.8GHz	65W	4	$175

With the release of the 9950 Black Edition AMD steps up from the 9850 100MHz to 2.6GHz from 2.5GHz but also increases the max TDP to 140W. The Phenom 9950 Black Edition takes over the $235 pricing the 9850 had which will be reduced to $207 starting July 7th, a helpful heads up from AMD. These will still be 9850 Black Editions for a while in the channel but they will move towards normal edition eventually but should be able to get a 9850 Black Edition for a steal in a week.

The other new processors being released are the low wattage quad core processors, the X4 9350e and 9150e which have a max TDP of 65w. Previously 95 was the lowest TDP for Phenoms and it still is for even Intel's lowest clock speed quad core processors giving AMD a 30W advantage here. This could be a boon for HTPCs, file servers, or other computers that are run 24/7.

Other than that though there aren't too many changes to AMD's lineup. We should see some price cuts officially updated some time today on AMD's website but that's about it. So let's move on.

NEW AMD Phenom X4 processors TECH SPECS:
Processor Model / Frequency: X4 9950 / 2.6GHz
Processor Model / Frequency: X4 9350e / 2.0GHz
Processor Model / Frequency: X4 9150e / 1.8GHz
L1 Cache Sizes: 64K of L1 instruction and 64K of L1 data cache per core (512 KB total L1 per processor)
L2 Cache Sizes: 512KB of L2 data cache per core (2MB total L2 per processor)
L3 Cache Size: 2MB (shared)
Packaging: Socket AM2+ 940-pin organic micro pin grid array (micro-PGA)
Fab location: AMD's Fab 36 wafer fabrication facilities in Dresden, Germany
Process Technology: 65-nanometer DSL SOI (silicon-on-insulator) technology
Approximate Transistor count: ~ 450 million
Approximate Die Size: 285 mm2
Memory Controller Type: Integrated 128-bit wide memory controller *
Types of Memory Supported: Support for unregistered DIMMs up to PC2 8500 (DDR2-1066MHz)
Memory Controller Speed: X4 9950: up to 2.0GHz with Dual Dynamic Power Management
X4 9350e: up to 1.8GHz with Dual Dynamic Power Management
X4 9150e: up to 1.6GHz with Dual Dynamic Power Management
HyperTransport 3.0 Specification: X4 9950: One 16-bit/16-bit link @ up to 4.0GHz full duplex (2.0GHz x2)
X4 9350e: One 16-bit/16-bit link @ up to 3.6GHz full duplex (1.8GHz x2)
X4 9150e: One 16-bit/16-bit link @ up to 3.2GHz full duplex (1.6GHz x2)
Total Processor Bandwidth: X4 9950: Up to 33.1 GB/s bandwidth
X4 9350e: Up to 31.5 GB/s bandwidth
X4 9150e: Up to 29.9 GB/s bandwidth
Max Ambient Case Temp: X4 9950: 61o Celsius
X4 9350e: 70o Celsius
X4 9150e: 70o Celsius
Nominal Voltage: X4 9950: 1.05-1.30 Volts
X4 9350e: 1.05-1.125 Volts
X4 9150e: 1.05-1.15 Volts
Max TDP: X4 9950: 140 Watts
X4 9350e: 65 Watts
X4 9150e: 65 Watts
*Note: configurable for dual 64-bit channels for simultaneous read/writes