AMD Phenom 9600 Black Edition CPU Review – Page 7

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Final Thoughts and Conclusion

At the beginning of this review I said something about AMD being the scrappy underdog in the CPU market. Well the effort put into the Phenom 9600 Black Edition has definitely shown they aren’t going away, and are continuing the fight. Those characteristics are rather redeeming, and to many in the enthusiast market they have a certain charm. But as charming as they may be they can’t mask the cold hard truth, and that is that this part, in its current iteration, still can’t quite compete with Intel’s equivalent.

It’s really too bad to, as AMD has been dogged by problems since the release of the Phenom line. First was the delays and parts shortages. Then the TLB erratum came out, and the fix bringing down performance didn’t help. I’m glad to see AMD release an off switch of sorts in OverDrive to disable the TLB fix. They have also gone to great lengths to make sure people are aware of the potential issues from disabling the fix, though I have yet to experience any problems from running with the fix disabled full time. They are definitely soldiering on.

I could give AMD props for releasing an unlocked processor at such a tantalizing price point. The only problem with that is the feature is rendered unimportant by the sheer refusal of the Phenom 9600 Black Edition to be overclocked more than a token amount. This is even more un-nerving when Intel has a quad core processor at the same price point that performs better at stock and overclocks better.

There’s no way to sugar coat this, so I’ll be blunt in saying that it’s hard to recommend the Phenom 9600 Black Edition for an overclocker system. The processor doesn’t perform as well as its contemporaries and doesn’t offer any additional value over them. AMD’s efforts are to be commended, as the Phenom and the Spider platform are part of are good starting point. I just think the processor side of things needs to mature a little more before they can really think about taking down Chipzilla.

As of this review is hitting the web, AMD has trickled out the new B3 revision CPU’s. Hopefully we’ll be able to get our hands on one of these new CPU’s to see if some of our grumblings about overclocking headroom and the performance hit on the TLB fix have been rectified.

The Good