• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Fastest AM2+/AM2 CPU?

phenom ii 940BE is an AM2+ processor and will easily smoke your 9950 (2.8ghz stock)

in fact, depending on bios support all AM3 cpus are compatible with AM2+ and even AM2 (although i believe few original AM2 boards got the bios loving treatment for this)

edit: looking at your sig, the original crosshair doesnt support the phenom ii's, the 9950 is the best you can get on that one. I need to go to bed...
 
Last edited:
Wouldnt bother putting an am3 cpu in an am2 board, the ht link and cpu-nb would be capped at ht1, and 1600 cpu-nb.

But yeah an am3 in an am2+ is great, thats what enabled me to reuse 4gb of ddr2 from my e8400, which then lasted me for another 2 years with an x4 620, then an x2 555 unlocked.
That was the beauty of amd engineering back then, dual memory controllers.
 
Last edited:
thingemajib said:
edit: looking at your sig, the original crosshair doesnt support the phenom ii's, the 9950 is the best you can get on that one. I need to go to bed...
Click to expand...

This^

CPU you have is the best match for that board.
I'm sure they updated some of their other 590 chipset boards to support PII though, wonder why they didn't update the Crosshair.
 
Davedree said:
Wouldnt bother putting an am3 cpu in an am2 board, the ht link and cpu-nb would be capped at ht1, and 1600 cpu-nb.

But yeah an am3 in an am2+ is great, thats what enabled me to reuse 4gb of ddr2 from my e8400, which then lasted me for another 2 years with an x4 620, then an x2 555 unlocked.
That was the beauty of amd engineering back then, dual memory controllers.
Click to expand...

Can't see it being that bad.
AM2+ Phenom II's are 1.8GHZ HT and CPU-NB.

Bit depressing the Crosshair doesn't take Phenom II's.
 
Thanks guys!

How much of a bottleneck is the Phenom 9950 going to be if I go for a new GPU, was looking at a 7950 or GTX 570......but may hold off f the CPU is going to really limit my FPS.
 
peps1 said:
Thanks guys!

How much of a bottleneck is the Phenom 9950 going to be if I go for a new GPU, was looking at a 7950 or GTX 570......but may hold off f the CPU is going to really limit my FPS.
Click to expand...

You would lose 20-25% performance compared to say an i5 3570K. I don't think that warrants "horrendously bad" - but it will certainly be noticable. At the end of the day if you intend to upgrade CPU in the future there is no harm in buying the graphics card now and seeing how it runs. For example in Left 4 Dead you would get 95 fps instead of 140 fps with the i5. :)

You will probably find you should be able to play every game maxxed even with that CPU since GPU is hugely more important compared to what CPU you have.
 
Alkalinepro5 said:
You would lose 20-25% performance compared to say an i5 3570K. I don't think that warrants "horrendously bad" - but it will certainly be noticable. At the end of the day if you intend to upgrade CPU in the future there is no harm in buying the graphics card now and seeing how it runs. For example in Left 4 Dead you would get 95 fps instead of 140 fps with the i5. :)

You will probably find you should be able to play every game maxxed even with that CPU since GPU is hugely more important compared to what CPU you have.
Click to expand...
No offense dude...I don't think think you are pulling those figures out of thin-air. And overclocked i5 can do double the frame rate of an overclocked Phenom II X4 in some games...and considering the Phenom I is much slower than the Phenom II is known as a failure more or less like the Bulldozer (being hot and slow), I have no freaken idea where you pull the ONLY 20-25% slower than the i5 3570K from.

The Phenom I would bottleneck even cards like the 8800GT, let alone anything faster.
 
Last edited:
Where are you pulling the figures that it'd bottleneck an 8800GT?

I agree with the last 2 posts sentiments though, the Phenom I was pretty dreadful.
My 9600 didn't seem so bad at the time, but that was many many moons ago. It was as hot as the sun and it didn't really take kindly to much higher clock speed.
 
Well some of the lesser Phenom I's were like 2GHZ, at horrendous IPC and plagued with issues, I couldn't half see them giving abysmal performance with higher than an 8800GT in the consistent frame rate compartment.

But that's well before my time.
 
Last edited:
Interesting:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/21?vs=81

It appears according to Anandtech Bench,the IPC difference between a DDR2 Phenom 9950 and a DDR2 Phenom II X4 920 is not massive when it comes to games. However,the main issue was the Phenom had very poor clockspeeds,ran hot and overclocked poorly.

Edit!!

I would place it around Q6600 level, perhaps a bit slower,winning in some games and loosing in others if you look at a few reviews:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/21?vs=53

http://techreport.com/review/16147/amd-phenom-ii-processors/4
 
Last edited:
The GPU's back then were well worse than a 7970 though.
Plus the 9950 was more of a hybrid between the original launch of the Phenom and Phenom II (All the CPU's of Phenom's on Anandtech aren't of the original Agena launch)
 
Last edited:
Martini1991 said:
The GPU's back then were well worse than a 7970 though.
Plus the 9950 was more of a hybrid between the original launch of the Phenom and Phenom II (All the CPU's of Phenom's on Anandtech aren't of the original Agena launch)
Click to expand...

The OP has an 9950 though,which means he has a CPU which is roughly Q6600 level,perhaps a tad slower as indicated by the reviews I added. The early Phenom CPUs had the TLB bug ,which meant if you used the patch it reduced performance. The 9950 is a B3 stepping Phenom AFAIK which fixed the bug.

The main issue is that the 9950 overclocked poorly,which is why the Q6600 generally lasted longer.

OTH,I personally think the OP needs to overhaul their entire rig.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom