AMD outs a triumvirate of new quads

AMD JUST CAME out with three new Phenom CPUs at opposite ends of the market, the X4 9950 'Black', X4 9350e and X4 9150e. Two are 65W parts, the other is... err, far far more.

The raw specs are 140W TDP for the 9950 at 2.6GHz and 65W for the 9350e at 2.0GHz and 9150e at 1.8GHz. The prices are $235, $195 and $175 respectively, and the sharp-eyed among you will notice that the 9950 costs exactly what the 9850 does. That is because in a week, on July 7, the 9850 will drop to $205. Both will remain 'Black', but the 9950 will be blacker because, before the end of the year, the 9850 will fade from black, and go back to a locked part.

You have to wonder why AMD is bothering to lock Phenoms at all, with the Black parts selling at effectively no premium, why not just let people have fun. Anything AMD can do to foster the enthusiast market at this point is probably a good thing, and if you don't have the raw speed, play up the features.

In any case, the interesting part of the bunch is the 9350e. It isn't a barn burner, but for media center boxes, coupled with a 780G board, or better yet a 790GX, it could be a pretty solid media/casual gaming rig. This part fills a hole in the market, there aren't any sub 95W Intel quads out there for mainstream consumer use, but there could be quite easily if the 9350e is a hit.

In any case, hardcore gamers will probably turn up their noses at the low clock speeds in the -e parts, but as long as you are not trying to eke out the last FPS, these parts would make a dandy low-noise desktop.

So, how did they do? Using the same exact setup as the we did with the original 780G review, the numbers lined up quite well. To recap, that is a Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-2SH mobo, Corsair DDR2 1066 memory and a PC Power and Cooling/OCZ Silencer 750W PSU. Power draw was measured at the wall with an Extech True RMS Power Analyser. The same caveat as last time needs to be said, the PSU is underworked and far less efficient that it would be if we were pulling 500+ W, so knock about 20+ per cent off the wall power to get power used by the board itself.

We ran our usual power draw test, 3DMark06 under XP SP3 patched to current as of June 28. Just for fun, we threw in the 4850e and the X4 9600 from the last test, as well as the 8750 X3. So now you can compare a K8, X3, X4 B2 and a X4 -e in terms of power. It looks like this.

The raw numbers

The lowest idle number is of course the 4850e, and it beats the quads by almost 20W, the really odd part is the greater than 20W gap from there to the 8750 X3. Lose one core, gain 20W? Binning problem, or binning opportunity? The dual core 4850e also takes the bottom of the loaded power charts, and there is a big 33W gap to the 9350e. From there, the 8750 and 9600 are almost on top of each other.

Performance is about where you would expect it to be, the 4850e taking up the bottom with sub-1200 scores, and the others right on top of each other at 1540+/-2. A quick overclock of the 9600 to 2.8GHz barely moved the score, so 3DMark06 looks pretty GPU bound here.

In the end, with the new parts are priced pretty low, but won't challenge Intel for supremacy. For the high end 9950, you gain 100MHz for a few watts so make sure your mobo can handle the extra. In a week, it will not cost you any more than a 9850, so you might want to hold off for a few days.

The 9350e and the 9150e look to be solid and inexpensive workhorses for the HTPC/SFF/quiet office PC set. You give up 200MHz for 30W, not a bad trade. They are solidly mid-range parts that won't stun any gamers, but they plug gaps in the market, and do so quite nicely. µ