Welcome to 2011! The first review of the year goes to AMD’s first CPU refresh of the year. What does it bring?
First up is the Phenom II x4 975 Black Edition, a 3.6GHz (200MHz*18) CPU with all the standard features of the Phenom II line (Deneb core, 4x512K L2 cache, 6MB L3 cache, 125W TDP, 45nm process). Of course, being a Black Edition CPU the multiplier is unlocked, allowing upward adjustment as high as your motherboard will allow. Its price of $195 places it at just a few dollars more than the 970 BE.
The other CPU under review today is a bit of an oddity. The Phenom II x4 840 is a 3.2GHz CPU (200MHz*16) with a Propus core, meaning a 4x512K L2 cache and no L3 cache. Confused? Us too. Sound more like an Athlon II? That’s what we thought. Turns out AMD wanted to resurrect the Phenom II 800 series, and chose this CPU as the one to reintroduce the line. Its price of $102 is also odd. The Athlon II x4 645’s MSRP is $118. Yep. Faster and cheaper than the 645.
Benchmarks
There aren’t any surprises when it comes to performance. These two CPUs are minor speed bumps from their predecessors and perform exactly as expected.
In all of the tests, there are slight performance gains with the new processors, but it never gets beyond there. Since the difference in speed over the previous CPUs is 100MHz in both cases this is entirely expected.
Gaming
The CPU doesn’t play a huge role in game performance; a better GPU will almost always provide a larger performance boost here. All of our gaming benchmarks show this, regardless of settings. A sample from each game is provided. Keep in mind that the (sometimes significantly faster) Core i7 doesn’t produce significantly faster results than even the Phenom II x4 840.
Conclusion
The Phenom II x4 840’s designation still leaves us scratching our heads though, since its performance looks very similar to an Athlon II, but considering it costs less than and outperforms the x4 645, it’s not all bad. Odd naming choices aside, both of these new CPUs represent good values in their respective performance segments, and both get a solid recommendation for new system builds. They certainly don’t warrant upgrading from “close” models such as the 970BE or 645, but if you’re moving up from a dual or triple core to a quad core system these are definitely worth a look.
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