AMD Phenom II X4 940 Review – Not the Second Coming

The Dragon Platform and Testing Setup

Spider, Part Duex

The other half of this release is that of the “Dragon Platform”.  AMD started in on the platform craze with the original Spider, and now it has become much larger and more reptilian with the Dragon.  Essentially Dragon is a Phenom II running in a 7 series chipset motherboard, paired with a Radeon 4000 series card.  The 790GX chipset has certainly turned a lot of heads, and the addition of the slightly more functional and slightly more performant SB 7×0 southbridge has made it a much more viable product from user and OEM standpoints.


One thing to mention is that the hot item which was attached to the SB750 southbridge, namely ACC (advanced clock calibration), does not work on the new Phenom II processors.  Apparently this feature is only active, and actually works, on the 65 nm Phenom based parts.  The official word is that AMD has integrated the technology in ACC into the Phenom II processor.  Apparently the Phenom II can adjust its internal clock skews depending on feedback, and the improved overclocking performance certainly shows itself off well with the overclocks we have seen.  This is actually good news for those who own an older 770 or 790FX board which was paired with the SB600 chipset that did not feature ACC functionality.  With a BIOS upgrade, these high end 790FX boards can again be kings of Phenom overclocking.

System Setup

For this review I used a recommended Dragon platform.  Originally I was using the Gigabyte 790GX based board, but it had a bad habit of corrupting the F3H bios and reverting back to F2, which was not good because the F2 did not fully recognize the Phenom II processor.  I then went to the Asus M3A78-T Deluxe, and while the overclocking ability was slightly lower than that of the Gigabyte board, it certainly did fine.  AMD provided a reference 4870 512 MB video card, as well as the Phenom II.

• Asus M3A78-T Deluxe
• Radeon 4870 512 MB
• 4 GB G-Skill DDR-2 1066
• Seagate 1 TB 7200.12 Hard Drive
• Lite-On DVD-R/RW SATA Drive
• ThermalTake ToughPower 750 Watt Power Supply
• Vista Ultimate 64 SP1
• Catalyst 8.12 Beta/Hotfix Drivers
  

For comparison I used the Asus X38 based Maximus Formula.  This is a rather high end motherboard, but for performance purposes it acts like any other X38 (or dare I say… DDR-2 based X48 motherboard).  For comparison I used the Core 2 Quad 9770, but clocked down to 9550 speeds.  So basically it is a 2.83 GHz processor on a 1333 MHz FSB.  While I was able to get power numbers at load, to get the processor to clock at that lower speed I had to turn off SpeedStep and other power saving features.


In terms of how these two products match up, the Intel system is going to be significantly more expensive than the Phenom II.  The Q9550 retails for around $314 at this time, while the Phenom II is supposed to be coming in at around $275.  The motherboard situation is quite different though.  A new X38 or X48 based motherboard will cost around $200 to $300 with comparable features as a $135 to $145 AMD 790GX based motherboard.  AMD has a $75 or so price advantage over its competition in this particular arena.


When it comes to the new Nehalem based i7, AMD has a much larger price advantage primarily due to the cost of the X58 motherboards that are currently the only platform that the i7 processors can run on.  While the i7 920 is priced at $266, the cheapest X58 I have seen so far is around $230, with most boards being well over $260 and approaching $400 at the high end.  Unfortunately I did not have access to an i7 920 and corresponding motherboard for testing.