AMD Phenom II X4 810

The original Phenom was launched in 2007 and while reasonably priced, it didn’t have the innards to make it an alternative to Intel’s Core line. Flash forward to 2009 and AMD has launched its new Phenom II CPUs.

The X4 810 is a quad-core chip and runs each of its cores at 2.6GHz and being an 800 series processor, it is outfitted with 4Mbytes of L3 cache (higher-end 900 models will feature 6Mbytes of L3 cache). Comparing the Phenom II to its predecessor, there are numerous differences but the biggest is that both DDR3 and DDR2 memory are supported. For existing Phenom owners, Phenom II also offers a quick and simple upgrade path as it is compatible with the older AM2+ boards in addition to the current generation AM3 models.

Running our benchmark suite, the Phenom II returned numbers that make it far quicker than its predecessor and thus a more competitive performer to the Core i7. On the app front, the Phenom II X4 810 scored 8513 in Cinebench 10’s multi-CPU benchmark, whereas as our 2.67GHz Core i7 920 scored 13,387. Running our multimedia benchmarks, the 810 took three minutes and 12 seconds to convert our test WAV file to a MP3. The Core i7 required two minutes and 30 seconds.

On the gaming front, the Phenom II scored 231fps in our F.E.A.R test to the i7’s 296fps. While the Phenom II is slower overall it’s worth noting the Core i7 is considerably more expensive, retailing for close to US $300.