I took the opportunity to test the new CPU with a new motherboard from XFX, the nForce 750a SLI motherboard. Previous X4 CPU reviews were done on a AMD 790FX motherboard but I’ve had issues with that board’s SATA controller and nearly all AMD-based motherboards with Promise SATA controllers running in RAID 0 mode.
This lead to rethinking the motherboard in the test platform and I used an nForce 750a SLI motherboard from XFX in the testing. For a balanced comparison against the 9850 I tested that CPU on this new motherboard as well adding those scores to our AMD database. We don’t have equivalently priced Intel CPUs and comparing the 9950 to the QX9770 is not a fair comparison as the target markets are totally different. One thing to note that the XFX motherboard doesn’t officially support the 9950 or 9850 but I encountered no difficulties running either on this new motherboard.
Test System
- AMD Phenom X4 9950 CPU clocked at 2.6GHz
- AMD Phenom X4 9850 CPU clocked at 2.5GHz
- 2GB Crucial Ballistix DDR2-1066MHz memory clocked at 800MHz
- 2 74GB WD Raptor SATA HDDs in RAID 0 Mode
- Rosewill 950W PSU
- ASUS 16x DVD-ROM
- Windows Vista 32-bit Business with SP1 installed
- XFX nForce 750a motherboard running 18.11 Forceware drivers
Tests
- Sysmark 2007 Preview Patch 3
- 3DMark05/06/Vantage
- PCMark05/Vantage
- CPUBench 2003
- Crystalmark 2004
- Pifast
- wPrime95 1.55
- SpecViewPerf 10
- Aquamark 3
