AMD has been in a battle with Intel for the best CPU for several years now. AMD CPUs in the last couple of years have been known for their high price/performance ratio and until the launch of the Barcelona CPU last year where the performance didn’t reach expectations and the price of the new CPUs didn’t match up with the competition from Intel’s inexpensive Core 2 Quad line like the Q6600 that recently dropped to $183 online.
Earlier this year AMD released the B3 variant of the Phenom CPU, the 9850. The Phenom X4 9850 fixed the issues with performance that the original Phenom CPUs had an issue with. The X4 9850 is the basis for our AMD platform and performs pretty well for the price point it is targeted at. Today, AMD is releasing the next Phenom X4 CPU, the 9950 which has in common the features of the 9850 with 100MHz increase in clock speed and that is the CPU I’m reviewing.
