Today, the 45nm era arrived for AMD. While Intel introduced its 45nm CPUs nearly one year ago, AMD struggled to keep up and lost a significant market share over the past year. Dirk Meyer is urgently rebuilding AMD and pushing for new products, and while in the past AMD has struggled with the Phenom series, the Phenom II promises to change that.



The major difference between the old and new Phenom, apart from the new manufacturing process, is the huge 6MB shared L3 cache. Besides some small optimizations here and there, the CPU is just an evolved version of its older brother. The TDP is rated at 125W which is quite high, although AMD has improved the Cool'n'Quiet feature. The idle multiplier has been lowered to 4x, so the CPU will run at a mere 800MHz when idling. The 45nm process will hopefully prevent the CPU from hitting this theoretical maximum temperature even during extreme situations



Testbed:

Motherboard:
MSI DKA790GX (provided by MSI)
Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DS4H (provided by AMD)
AMD 790GX/SB750

CPU:
AMD Athlon X2 3800+ EE
AMD Athlon X2 4850e (provided by AMD)
AMD Athlon X2 7750 (provided by AMD)
AMD Phenom 9850 Black Edition (provided by AMD)
AMD Phenom II 940 Black Edition (provided by AMD)
Intel E7200 (provided by K&M Elektronik)
Intel Q9450 (provided by Intel)

CPU-Cooler:
Scythe Andy Samurai Master (provided by Scythe-Europe)

Memory:
Kingston 2GB Kit PC2-9600U KHX1200D2K2/2G (provided by Kingston)
CL4-4-4-12 CR2T at 1.80V

Graphics Card:
Jetway Radeon HD3870 (provided by mec-electronics)

Power supply:
Seasonic S12II 500W

Hard disk:
Samsung Spinpoint F1 (provided by Ditech)

Case fans:
SilenX iXtrema Pro 14dB(A) (provided by PC-Cooling.at)
Scythe DFS122512LS

Case:
Cooler Master Stacker 831 Lite (provided by Cooler Master)