Gaming Performance
The overall 3DMark06 scores show the Phenom is more positive light than they should because of the different graphics cards at work on the two testing setups — remember the Phenoms were running dual Radeon HD 3850 cards while the Intel Core 2 and AMD Athlon CPUs were running a single 8800 GTX card. The CPU tests aren’t affected though and once again the Phenoms split the pack of existing dual- and quad-core CPUs.
Our two Valve-provided tests show the same pattern – the new Phenom 9600 and 9900 parts are faster than any other AMD solution and the dual-core Intel offerings but they can’t quite catch up to what even the modestly priced Q9450 can provide.
