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Memory Bandwidth To test memory bandwidth, we are going to look at the Read, Write, and Copy values as tested by Everest. Higher numbers are better:
Here we have some very interesting data. For Read and Copy values, the AMD pretty much cleans house across the board. The Write numbers, however, are a bit lacking, and the Intel architecture shows significant improvement in Writes as FSB is increased. And so, at the end of our long and windy road, with our results in hand, we must ask ourselves, is Phenom II worth your hard earned dollar? The answer that I am invariably left with is "that depends". For an existing AM2+ user, the potential for upgrading to the new Deneb-based CPU is a no-brainer. What has really held back the original Phenom is the lack of overclocking headroom; and that has changed in a big way with Phenom II. For users who are not interested in overclocking, I would also recommend the Phenom II, considering it beats out the Q9450 equivalent in nearly every test, and it is sure to beat out a Q9400 by an even wider margin. But in this part of the internet, "not overclocking" a CPU is downright blasphemous. There have been a lot of users that were hoping to see 4GHz on air in the realm of possibility for this chip, and as you can see, that has turned out to be too optimistic. While we did not see miraculous overclocking, the headroom has definitely made a big improvement. So what about the competition? When lining up the X4 940 against a similarly priced Q9400, what comes out ahead once both are overclocked? With the 8x multiplier limitation, the Q9400 could be expected to hit 3.6-3.8GHz realistically. Given the clock comparisons in our benchmarks, the edge goes to the Intel architecture. Pros:
Cons:
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