AMD Phenom II X4 980 BE 3.70 GHz

[Omega]

AMD launched yet another Deneb SKU, named Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition, and clocked to yet another all time fastest from AMD - 3.70 GHz. After recent price cuts, Phenom II X4 980 will cost around $185, which puts it back to back with Intel's locked SB models Core i5 2400 and 2500. This may be the last time for our friend to shine and battle out with the competition.

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[WarraWarra]

Am I wrong when I presume it is just a stop gap processor for folks that want a bit more power from their aging pc's ?

Price is reasonable but if I am about to build something new or upgrade then the intel2500 and p67 mboard would at least be more sensible.

 

[Izliecies]

even the i3 21xx is more sensble.. actually it is the most sensible buy of them all

 

[TheLaughingMan]

I don't know why Omega is wasting time with this Mhz bump processors. I am an AMD guy and I don't even keep track of these releases.

I would like to see a TPU review of the E-350 as both an HTPC and a laptop processors. Yeah I know it beats Atom by a bit in CPU and destroys it in Integrated GPU, but what about the i3-2100's IGP? What about power consumption in a low power scenario like an HTPC? And I would like to know how it overclocks if at all. No review so far has even dreamed of trying to OC an E-350. Why?

 

[sniviler]

How did you reach 78c without a thermal shutdown ? bios option ?

 

[Bjorn_Of_Iceland]

78c degree on this kind of proc is not enough for thermal shutdown

 

[DrunkenMafia]

Looking through those graphs it makes you realise just how good those 2500k processors are.... amazing. And still near the bottom with pwr consumption.

I personally think you would be crazy to buy deneb at this stage. Unless its 2nd hand off ebay. lol

 

[Omega]

I don't know why Omega is wasting time with this Mhz bump processors.

I wouldn't put it like that. As you may have noticed, there are some changes in hardware used for testing, as well as some new benchmarks since last batch of reviews. At first it was planed to update the benchmark suite and testing methods with Sandy Bridge launch, which I have failed to do miserably, despite all the problems we had that were "out my hands".

The delay enabled me to fine tune the benchmark suite, find the right methods and settings to run benchmarks without bugs or non consistent results, which is a real pain in the ass when you have 20-30 completely different benchmarks and measurements to do with +30 CPU samples, and then on top of that add "omega made an error" factor. Just an example, after hundreds of runs on 3DMark 11, few days ago I found out that all of my Phenom II X4 SKU's results are about 100-200 points less than they should be. It ain't much of a difference, but if you don't correct it from the start, the errors tend to multiply to a point where benchmark results are no longer valid.

With last benchmark suite I had to scrap 3-4 benchmarks, because i discovered bugs in results after almost 6 moths of testing. I hope this suite will hold out without any loss of benchmark results, in fact, I'm working on adding PCMark 7 and Crysis 2 results in there.

But, back to your statement. This Phenom II review is a familiar ground for me, as we have done more AMD (thanks to their great support) reviews than Intel. So it was a lot easier for me to create a review template, and graphs template with this kind of review, rather than something like SB/APU/HTPC review. This enables me to finish up other reviews in shorter time, and lack of spare time has been a big problem for me last few months. Now that we broke the ice on new benchmark suite, I'm really hoping you'll have a chance of reading CPU reviews more often.

I would like to see a TPU review of the E-350 as both an HTPC and a laptop processors.

So would I
As I said above, time is the only problem now. Next up are few of Sandy Bridge SKU's, and if there's any time left before Bulldozer launch I'll try to make yours and mine wishes come true

 

[OneCool]

WOW!!

Its bad when a i3 is spankin you

 

[Omega]

Core i3 2120 is for sure far better choice than Phenom's for gaming and more singlethreaded oriented workloads. But quad core Phenom's still offer almost double the performance of Core i3 2120 in environment where multitreading matters.

Not that I'm defending Phenom. The Deneb core is showing its age at every step, and it does look rather outdated compared to Sandy Bridge, but let's not judge processors just by gaming graphs. There are far more important tasks CPU's do for you than improving your gaming experience by 5-10 frame rates

 

[ic3r0ck]

there has to be something wrong in the Cinebench r11.5 64bit benchmark, it doesn't make sense.

 

[alexsubri]

Good processor for $, glad my 965 Black Edition is still holding it`s ground

 

[TheLaughingMan]

But, back to your statement. This Phenom II review is a familiar ground for me, as we have done more AMD (thanks to their great support) reviews than Intel. So it was a lot easier for me to create a review template, and graphs template with this kind of review, rather than something like SB/APU/HTPC review. This enables me to finish up other reviews in shorter time, and lack of spare time has been a big problem for me last few months. Now that we broke the ice on new benchmark suite, I'm really hoping you'll have a chance of reading CPU reviews more often.

So would I
As I said above, time is the only problem now. Next up are few of Sandy Bridge SKU's, and if there's any time left before Bulldozer launch I'll try to make yours and mine wishes come true

Its good to know you overhauled the testing software suite to improve accuracy and reliability. I am currently working on becoming the AMD for Futurelooks.com, so I may get around to some of that before you though I doubt it. My guess is I will get the chance to confirm your results first hand soon after the fact.

Who knows, a year from now we maybe PMing each other information about strange results in test. lol

I hope you do get around to the E-350 because I really want someone to put it through the ringer instead of all these pre-product reviews and people just testing them at stock with stock cooling on Gigabyte's power hungry mobos. I still love Gigabyte boards, but if you are going to make the statement that they are power hungry....then were are the tests for the chip on other board brands?

 

[Semi-Lobster]

I wonder if its worth replacing my 940 with the 970/975/980 or just going right to Bulldozer...

 

[Omega]

there has to be something wrong in the Cinebench r11.5 64bit benchmark, it doesn't make sense.

Aye. The results are not in seconds but in Cinebench "points".
Will fix it asap, thank you.

 

[Zyon]

Black edition with native 3.7ghz? Wonder if it can go over 4.5ghz on air like the 2500K can.

 

[bear jesus]

Great review as always but I have to wonder if the overclocking was held back at all with such high temps, as far as i know an as far as i can find AMD lists the max safe temp as 62c for most phenoms.

I know it's only 16c above the stated max safe temp, but it makes me wonder, say a GPU with a max safe temp of 95c was run at 111c it would probably shut down as those are insanely hot but 62c is not even hot enough to pasteurize so I'm not exactly sure where the heat issue plays a part with such low rated temps for the phenoms.

 

[Pijoto]

Looking through those graphs it makes you realise just how good those 2500k processors are.... amazing. And still near the bottom with pwr consumption.

I personally think you would be crazy to buy deneb at this stage. Unless its 2nd hand off ebay. lol

Power consumption on Idle for these top tier phenom II X4 chips is amazing considering they're a couple generations behind intel, it's only 2 watts more than the core i5 2500! Load power is a bit dissappointing, but you can undervolt these chips quite a bit from stock and save considerable amounts of wattage.

Like you said it's crazy to buy these chips now for brand new systems, but as an upgrade later on (which I plan to upgrade from my athlon II X2 250, eventually) these chips still have a lot of life left in them.

 

[trt740]

Power consumption on Idle for these top tier phenom II X4 chips is amazing considering they're a couple generations behind intel, it's only 2 watts more than the core i5 2500! Load power is a bit dissappointing, but you can undervolt these chips quite a bit from stock and save considerable amounts of wattage.

Like you said it's crazy to buy these chips now for brand new systems, but as an upgrade later on (which I plan to upgrade from my athlon II X2 250, eventually) these chips still have a lot of life left in them.

I agree as a upgrade for existing AMD sytems they make sense, but not as a new system build.

 

[Chef_uk]

Current System
Mobo: M2N-SLI DELUXE (BIOS Flashed)
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3.2Ghz Dual Core
Mem: 2GB DDR2
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX
PSU: Corsair HX620

Hi guys, first post here but have read the reviews over the years

I'm thinking of buying one of these to upgrade my old BF2 rig so it can play BF3. I'm thinking of coupling it with either an MSI ATI Radeon HD 6870 OR Asus GeForce GTX 560. My Budget is £300 so think i'm limited with what i can upgrade to gain maximum performance for BF3 without the need of a smaller upgrade down the line. Any thoughts?