your not alone..lol still using a 1045t and a 720... the other newer cpu i'v tried was an ath-alone 5350...... all that did was make me like the phenoms even more! lol
Wow, glad to see the first Phenom gen here, my first PC build was a 9650 back in the day, still running at 2.7 8gb ram & a gt 1030 for older games & some newer that don't require those new instructions. Great video, keep the good work :)
Have one of these, I agree pretty much with everything said. They haven't aged well, and the IPC simply isn't there. However as a daily driver it will do just fine. I recently built a retro 2005 PC with an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ and a Radeon X1800 XT, and it does HD video streaming, Facebook, messenger and any and all modern daily non-gaming tasks. Not that I'd recommend either, obviously, but even my dual core Athlon doesn't hit anywhere near 100% CPU load during HD streaming, downloading AND FB Messenger chatting simultaneously.
Aged as well as the core 2 quads at the time. Its just to old. Cant expect much from a $220 12 year old CPU. I still run one of these in my media center. Probably going to retire it soon.
I have a bunch of amd hp computers with Phenom ii x4 b95 or Athlon ii x4 640 for under £25, they work quite well with windows 10 not sure why your having problems with nvidia chipset sata and ssds, but one note don't use AHCI use IDE/normal/legacy mode(depends what your bios says it is) as the AHCI I find is broken on pre bulldozer systems
I made a build with E7500, HD 4550 and 6 gb ddr2. With Arch Linux and an SSD I do browsing and youtube with very good performance. For XP games (dual boot with Linux) I can put 8800 GT or HD 3850 or 4850 or 6850. The mobo can allow a Q6600 which of course I have it.
Wow. That puppy aged surprisingly well! I had the 9750 on my first build back in the day. Loved it. So many hours of Gmod and TS3 dumped into that thing.
I have a Phenom II X4 840 3.2GHz (because it was the best inexpensive upgrade for that box... 955 was too pricey!) ... far better than what it came with, but benches about 30% slower than the supposedly-slower 2.6GHz quadcore on that board's almost-twin, and you can see the difference in performance. Mine at least doesn't seem to be buggy; Win10 is exiled to that box and has been stable. I got it a solid copper Adaptec heatsink, and that keeps it nicely cool. With AMD stock cooker, I mean cooler, I thought it was gonna melt.
@@Reziac I've been using a Phenom II X4 840 on an ASRock A770DE+ MB for years. I probably built it in 2009 and It just refuses to die. All I've had to do was to replace one power supply, replace the clock battery and occasionally clean out the dust. I upgraded the boot drive to SSD a couple of years ago which was a must for day-to-day usability.
My main home system (non-gaming) is a Phenom II X4 810 on a GA-MA770T-UD3P motherboard. I've had it since, at least, 2009-2010 and it is a beast. I just, finally, maxed out the memory last month with 16 GB of G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series and gave it a new power supply, 600W EVGA. The only downside is this bastard is LOUD!!! P.S. I'm running Linux Mint 19.1 Tessa.
At the time of this CPU's release, I think I went with the Core 2 Duo, and being a broke student, I didn't have time to even look at the AMD equivalents of the time. Looking back now, I have a Phenom II build in part because I wanted a platform that was reasonably modern, but still had a chipset that could feature a native IDE port for working with those drives. From what I could see, some of the arbitrary CPU instruction requirements seems more for the purpose of some kind of hardware level DRM enforcement more than it is that the game or program *needs* to run it there.
Well instructions per se are not helpful in the operation of DRM; however some modern DRM solutions including newer versions of Denuvo are built with these instructions necessarily utilised, so that's a problem.
never had a Phenom.....just the Phenom 2.....i heard weird stories about the original Phenom so i skipped it...anyway great video Phil..thanks for covering the original Phenom
Reflashing BIOSes is a great idea to protect against bitrot. Can you make a video on installing OSes on SATA drives through IDE converters? Not how, but the results.
I literally built this system 2 weeks ago, ran into all kinds of problems too. And actually switched to a Intel platform, 775 socket. I just wanted a windows 7 machine.
@@philscomputerlab It OCs better and parts have far better availability but stock performance for the programs that where available when these CPUs where a thing is pretty similar to there price competitors. Motherboards from this time period are pretty much all a pain in the arse regardless of platform. I would never recommend anything this old as anything but collectors items when i5 2400 systems can be had for under $100.
If it werent for the instructions set these cpu's could be and still are a'lot of fun to mess with sadly games nowadays demand newer cpu with that said i still think these are great for old AAA titles Have great a day sir :)
I have a Phenom II X2 555 BE @ X4 4GHz as an emergency platform (using it right now) and still runs games ok with GTX 980 Ti. The instruction problem is truly the worst problem on these :/
I knew this wasn't going to be pretty. The Phenom series wasn't worth buying until the Phenom II showed up. But they haven't aged well for gaming, either, because they predate the latest instruction sets as well. If you want to game, the FX series is still good enough because they have all the instructions and plenty of cores, but not anything from the Phenom era.
I have to disagree. The Phenom II aged very well for gaming. I used a Phenom II X6 up until last year and even then only very few games used instruction sets that weren't supported by the phenom. Maybe the Assassin's Creed: Origin and newer episodes of the top of my head? And at that point the Phenom II was a 10 years old mid-range CPU It wouldn't have been a shame if it outright doesn't run anything. It'slike using a 133MHz Pentium MMX in 2005.
Yea, even the Phenom 2 is over now, the lack of sse3 kind of ended that one. Dead rising series and plenty after that started not bothering with old cpu support, so its not just a few at this point. They could patch it in but usually they don't bother.
FX has worse single thread performance and worse ipc than Phenom clock per clock, what a fucking non sense are you talking about? It doesn't even have all true cores... If Ryzen didn't released, AMD would be bankrupted for 3 years!!!
Oh yeah, a 6 core CPU that lost against an Intel 4 core and aged terribly by comparison. Great buy! I though AMD was smoking when I saw the prices of those back in the day...
hmmm not really...you can get a z77 with a 2500k for 70-90€....this performs two or three times faster than the phenoms...these cpus still out of order! its doesnt make any sense..a q6600 performs better than this
Another great video Phil, thanks a lot. My progression as cpus go was 486 sx 33, 486 dx 50, Pentium III, athlon xp, athlon 64, then I went to a mobile core i7 first gen, back to desktop i7 2600k, back to mobile intel crap, and now I'm very happy to rock a R7 1800x since 2018 and for many more years.
i started with a 386dx40 ( amd ) then to 486DX33 , 486dx2-66 , K5-133 , Cyrix 166, Pentium II 400, athlon Thunderbird 800 , Phenon 9950( working every day at my mother inlaw, A10 7850k ( now with the wife) and finally ryzen 1700 ( my own pc ) also have working laptop panasonic thoughbook with a I5
Those nforce 680i and 580 will die without active cooling like a chipset fan. I have a lot of dead SLi motherboards with dead chipsets or memory channels because of this.
I got the same board in the video. They sure did run hot. I rigged up a thermalrite tower cooler to the chipset and it still ran in the 60s, but better than mid 90s if was with the stock active cooling.
I have tons of dead Socket A/462 boards with fried chipsets or bloated capacitors, the bloated capacitors boards are awaiting repairs and the fried chipset boards are being used as spare part boards, or just being recycled.
I have evga 680i Sli with broken ethernet and one pcie slot that doesnt work. Owerheating gargabe couldnt Oc q6600 when it was new. I didnt sell it cos I didnt want people to hate me.
@Martin M Fun thing I have Asrock nforce2 Agp Am2+ mobo with ddr2 support ( I bought it for retro Pc to test Agp cards with phenom 9550) and it works great. On 680i sli Ethernet stoped working after 2 years, for Pcie slot I dont know did he ever worked I tried it in 2014 for fun and just 1 works (new bios, q6600, 8gb ddr2...)
I had a Phenom configuration until i saw your review of x79 platforms and made myself a pretty solid gaming PC. It served me verily for 12 years! So thanks a lot! I was even able to play Witcher 3 on my old faithful Phenom!
Great video... you should consider doing a video with a MiSTer running the ao486 core with an MT-32... that sounds right up your alley and would make for a very entertaining video, cheers
Phenom ii is a bit different beast to overclock. Pushing multiplier and cranking Vcore will get you almost non performance,only thing you will generate is heat. In term of pushing just frequency Phenom and Phenom ii are more or less similar in percentage.
I had built a Phenom x3 8450e system back in the late 00s. Ran it for the longest time before upgrading to a FX-6300, now on a properly modern Ryzen 3600. Back in 2008 people weren't as concerned about getting 60FPS in games as they are today.
Phil, when I saw the title for this video I remembered the i7-920. It was a legendary CPU back in the day and it has 4C8T, which is not totally obsolete right now. I would love it if you could look at the i7-920 one day, especially with a moderate overclock to 3.4 or 3.6 GHz.
Hey Phil those Asus board were always like that. A big headache for me. The NF chip is fairly good, and performance seemed low to me that it should have been. Alway good to have available a strip array to get beyond that single drive performance. Usually what I did was install on the secondary chip. And find the nforceware, and gart drivers as the chips set won't install any options and is not "default" compatible. THE BAD NEWS.. Hence it appears you've tested with a disabled system. No chipset running/drivers. All your " not working and problems" seem to be all that it is. Nforce software you cannot get from Nvidia website any more but you should be able to track one down. If you can find a later version that 1.1 it can and sometimes is a good or bad experience. As some things worked better and some worse depending on what you had.
One of my Uncles is still using his X4 since he built it in 2009. I cleaned it a couple times throughout the years for him & recently added an SSD to it for him which helped a lot. But for him since he does not play any Modern Games it is ok for him for now but not much longer because his motherboard also only supports 4 Gigs of RAM. I have been trying to talk him into building a Ryzen System, even the first or second generation Ryzen would be fine for him.
Oh boy, a Phenom 1. Given the microcode bugs, everyone thought these were comparatively bad, until Bulldozer launched. But at least Bulldozer was stable ... :P
@@geonerd They released a microcode update that disabled the offending functionality. Basically, one of the architectural features was bugged, so they had to slow down the processor a bit to get it to work properly.
@moofree Only 3 Phenom of the first series have this problem not all of them! But AMD has fixed that Ploblem fast! The most problems of the AM2-Plattform comes form bad designed Motherboards like from ASUS, ASRock, WinFast, Chaintech and SOYO! By the way... K10-Cores of Phenom are basically the same in the Bulldozer-CPU! The K10's are just not modular, have less cache, dont have the Datalink between L2 and L3 cache and on a small note! So what are you talking about?!
@@geonerd Same, I had both Phenom and Phenom II CPU's and never had any problems. In fact my Phenom II 975 @4Ghz was with me until the Ryzen series came out and I upgraded to a R7 1700X, which is still rocking today :D
My desktop is still using an AM3+ Phenom II x4 965 3.4ghz. Still works great, but when I update to an AM5 socket Ryzen in the far future, I'll keep it for a retro-gaming PC build. :)
PC hardware prices have skyrocketed due to COVID-19 causing shortages of parts. I went with a used part build, I am using a Intel Core I5 4690K 4.0 GHz OC, 16 GB DDR3 RAM, MSI GTX 1050 TI, 500GB SSD, 2TB HDD, Windows 10.
@@pentiummmx2294 It's kind of ironic: a lot of cheap PC parts come from China by either being salvaged, second-hand, or reproductions of older hardware types, and it's because of China producing the WuFlu that prices have spiked to ridiculous levels. "~May you live in interesting times" indeed...
i picked up a beige box pc for 20 bucks with an athlon 64 X2 4800+ (2006), using it for an xp machine playing around with my old pci-e cards. currently got a 9800gtx+ in it, waiting for an Athlon II X2 255 3.1GHz from 2009 to arrive which was 8 bucks on ebay. i hope the improvement is worth while! do you have any game recommendations from those years? thanks again for the vids :)
@@IJoeAceJRI Dude not everyone have deep pockets, honestly i fully understand those people, especially when you are student and cant work normal jobs yet so you have to make do whatever you have.
@@IJoeAceJRI why i have to spend a lot of money in a ney system, if i can buy a 15€ cpu and use it for my necesities, like basic gaming and ofimatic task
I had to check but I had that exact same 125W CPU, the exact same motherboard, and the exact same RAM. Definitely had a different GPU though, I first had a GTX 260 then I got a GT 740 that I got at a pawn shop for $5. Sadly my motherboard died to unknown causes about a year ago but it worked great for a really long time. If boards weren't so pricy I would probably rebuild it as a WinXP machine or something along those lines.
Nice video, as always. I had a phenom 9850 in november 2008 with the ASUS M3A32 MVP, although the SB600 on it is SATA-2 it works with SATA-3 HDD and SSD without issues. Upgraded to a Phenom II 940 six months later, cooler and faster. It still works, but not as a gaming PC. Edit: I remember having issues with a 9800GTX after making changes in the BIOS, after rebooting it didn't POST (the GPU fan kept spinning fast), I had to switch off the PSU because the reset button didn't work, only happened with that GPU.
I use a Phenom II x6 in my XP box. Overclocked it to 4ghz even. Got a board with DDR3 1600, USB3, SSDs plus an AMD HD 6970 and an Audigy XFi, it's lacks nothing at all :)
@@DyceFreak Mine had 32GB of DDr3 1600 OK to 3.9 GHZ and a RX 570 8gb and a WD 500GB SSD.. I must say, it could not run the games i wish nor play YT on 1080p 60fps
Great video as Usual, Phil! Thank you man, you're making my quarantine easier. Thinking at loud, did you ever consider to include some performance analysis in video rendering? I remember myself a couple of decades ago dreaming about building a fast P4 to encode some movies to DivX... I think it would be a nice retro review haha
I love my phenom ii x6. Of course on more modern games i prefer my fx 8350. But i don't know about crysis. I played it on athlon 64 x2 3800+ with a radeon hd 3850 and i remember that at 1280*1024 it run smoothly.
I bought an AMD Athlon II X3 425 back in 2010, since I'd read that many of those could unlock the 4th core and cache (so effectively change it to a Phenom II CPU). It worked really well (using mainboard Asus M4A785TD-V EVO) (I think it was unlocked to "Phenom II X4 B25"), so I felt I got a lot for my money :-) A few years later I upgraded to a used Phenom II X6 1055t (I had set the computer to be used as a Plex- and file-server, running Linux and ZFS). The CPU and motherboard supported ECC memory, which is recommended for ZFS. This computer has been running 24/7 until last week, when I finally upgraded to a Ryzen-based system (Ryzen 9 3900X). The Phenom II X6 system still works flawlessly though, so I will probably find some use for it (maybe a backup server).
Before watching this video i quickly checked this cpu at passmark charts and after watching this episode i was very impressed how well it ran new tomb raider games, interesting cpu, too bad your motherboard was crapping itself :D
I waited and got the Phenom 2 965 BE. I had come from a Core Duo. I will say the 965 BE performed great and was my main rig for 7 years or so. I made a big mistake and got a fairly cheap i5 6400 in 2015 and switched back to the 965 BE (overclocked the snot out of it) as the i5 6400 felt slow and stodgy. Got a Ryzen 1600 a year and a half later and retired the 965 BE to a kids computer where it still does a competent job. Definitely got my money's worth. I have owned 30 or so computers of Intel and AMD make over my many years but I have never been so unimpressed with a chip as I was with the i5 6400. Over all Intel and AMD have been good to me but dang that i5!
I had a phenom 9820 for a long time, it really wasn't a great cpu. It chugged on game then, and didn't oc at all. The phenom II X4 940 I replaced it with was a big performance bump, and oc like a dream. Plus quite a few including mine you could unlock the additional 1-2 cores with the right chip and board.
I remember seeing these in magazines when they came out and they just weren't as optimized for most games and software. Atleast not compared to Intel at the time with the Core series. I had a AMD Athlon 64X2 6400+ at the time in 2008 and didn't upgrade until 2013 for the FX 8350 and 2019 for the Ryzen 2600.
@bullseyestrat: It's not the CPU that is not optimized it's the games fault for not having support for multi core. Intel can't be that grate considering that they can't make a half decent GPU to run anything besides software render.
In my opinion, the best use would be an XP game machine or under Windows 10, simply a browser/word processor paired with a GT 210 or similar video card.
I had one of these for a while back in the day. It was the 140 W version, and with a proper AMD chipset like the 790FX, it performed quite decently for the price (I got it on sale for about NZ$300). I ran it at 3.0 GHz, which was the limit, since the first-gen Phenoms really weren't good overclockers. Its biggest issue was the lack of SSE3 instructions, which proved to be a problem even then, especially when it comes to emulation. This is why I replaced it with the LGA 1366 platform and a cheap Xeon E5506 ES CPU (4C/4T, 2.13 GHz) soon after, which easily clocked to 3.2 GHz and could compete favorably against the top-end Core 2 Quads like the QX9650.
Family computer had a Pentium D when I was a kid, but then went straight for budget Athlon II as a teen. Processor did absolutely everything fine for years, I didn't even bother changing the thermal paste for like 5 years, at that point it was all gone haha. It was even performing "OK" when I got a GPU updgrade, especially with a 10% overcklock. It's a bit of a shame the overclocking on those chips is so complicated with North Bridge, HT Link speed etc. If it was as easy as intel - just put the multiplier up, you could've easily push that thing to 4Ghz probably...
Owned the Phenom 9600 back in the day. I made it my routine daily to disable the TLB patch that reduced performance. Never once did I run into the bug that would cause the CPU to crash with the patch off. I admit during the time it may have been wiser to have a faster dual-core than a quad-core, but overall I never had an issue running any games up until 2012. Overall though it was the most eye opening experience I ever had going from a Low-End even when it was built Socket A Sempron 2500+ to the Phenom 9600. Even with my modern day pc no upgrade has replicated that experience.
honestly i enjoy cpu reviews the most, why? Because they are so different from each other and every generation from either intel or amd have its interesting points, whether its core count, clock speed, architecture, ram speed, overclocking capabilities. With gpus its kinda straight forward and very consistent in most cases, most of the time just looking at few graphs you can calculate approximately how it will run for all games and resolutions. I know its pain to test cpus but for me its the most interesting point in these benchmarks.
If I recall correctly, there was a pretty bad Branch Prediction Unit in the Phenom I series of CPUs causing performance to suffer greatly when patched via firmware. It is my understanding that this bug was fixed in the Phenom II series of CPUs which allowed them to perform much better than the previous generation. I'd be curious to see you comparing the two to see if there's any performance differences between the two platforms.
From what I've seen, SATA3 SSD drives can be used with older boards that only support SATA 1 or 2. You just wouldn't get the full performance of the SSD.
Last year my daily driver broke down and for few days I had to use an old workstation - unclocked Phenom II x2 555, 6 GB RAM, SSD and integrated HD3000. Windows worked very sluggishly on this, but after installing minimal Debian 9.9 with LXDE from scratch I was very positively surprised. Working with ~10 pages running in the Firefox (incl. 2x YT 720p) and Sublime Text 3 simultaneously was comfortable and fluent, on some "ancient" properitary driver even the desktop worked in FHD without issues.
I still have some love for the 2nd gens. My build back then was a Phenom II 955be , had a gtx 480 and I used a HAF9(something)5 full tower, 850w Corsair PSU, and my first USB SSD(that is still in use for the PC I am using now amazingly, outlasting 4 platter drives). I am surprised the 9950 even held up that good. There was quite a difference between Phenom and Phenom II.
Phil I’ve used a few of these chipsets and I feel like the best way to fix them is to toss them straight into the bin and replace them with something else. I’m not one to give up easily but obviously someone cut some corners somewhere on these.
Great video as always. I have one of those cpus but unfortunately it’s the 140w version and a lot of boards from that timeframe only support up to 95 or 125 as you said. You’re right about your recommendation- probably better to go with something like a q6600... or a phenom 2. The 95w 945 is faster, cooler and cheaper. And more compatible.
@@pentiummmx2294 Would either of you recommend upgrading to a 945/955 (95W) or B95/B97 today? I found a 955 for $11 shipped and it's the max cpu my mobo can handle. Unfortunately, I think my mobo is also limited to 2x2GB DDR2-800/1066 (might take 2x4GB DDR2-800, but not sure) and a PCIe x16 v1.1 slot lol. Not sure if my AM2+ K8 stock cooler will be sufficient for it. That would be another $20 or so for a CoolerMaster Hyper 212 Evo. Also stuck w a generic 4-pin cpu power PSU that's served me well so far (through static arc shutdowns through the usb port multiple times and a lightning strike that arced into my breaker box lol). Either that or ~$80 to upgrade to an Intel DH67CL w i5-3570 and a cheapo 500W PSU.
Ho-Yaw!!! I'm still running an All-Phenom lineup. My main desktop is a 6x 'Thuban' and my 'workstation' is a 2 socket Opteron with 24 cores! A third Phenom 4x gets occasional use as a media ripper and host for my ancient parallel-port Laserjet printer. Itching for a 16 core Ryzen, or maybe even a TR if the price slips a little lower later this year.
Seeing Just Cause 4 running on this made my jaw drop. My computer meets the min. requirements and refuses to run even with an RX 5700 XT paired with it. Crazy! As for what this can run eh there are enough in the backlog4life that could play on this and for the right price I would want this build. My brother had an AMD Phenom based system or maybe it was Phenom II. I'd like to see what gaming was like for him with what he used. Anyway to finish up like you said this is for collector's item and that fits what I want it for. Also on that note what would be the top card one would pair with the Phenom X4 9950BE at the time it was out? It would be nice to have the right video card too for it. Finally in regards to the Kingspec SSDs you have used for a year or two what is the oldest socket cpu paired with mobo do these SSDs or any SSD run with? Still haven't ever used one in a pc and wouldn't mind trying at a very cheap price.
Hi Phil, interesting cpu and makes me wonder why amd chose the names that they did because I bought a phenom 2 955 black edition in 2009. Going from 9950 to 955 is odd to me. Anyway thanks for the review. I really loved these CPUs back in the day, competing vs Intel before the fx series happened.
i had that CPU for a spam of about 2 year as main rig, exactly from 2013 to 2016... What i can recall is that i upgraded my rig to an Fx8350 since my AM2+ mobo only had 2 slots of ram and 4gb sticks of DDR2 were pretty rare and costly. and also, i went for an AMD cpu since i had a bad experience with Pentium 4 and Celeron D cpus, so i wanted to stick in AMD's platform. Finally, i went for the Fx8350 since i went to the Phenom 9950 from a Celeron D, and the 4 core improvement over the low tier "D" was massive, and i figured that i wanted an 8 core CPU since multitasking was a huge deal for me, i didn't care that i3 6100 could score more fps in some games compared to the Fx, i wanted the raw multitasking performance, and i really enjoyed that feature. As for the Phenom X4 9950 BE i recall it having 65 singlescore performance on cinebench R15, a number that was low by 2016 standars with intel 6th gen already released... But on the other hand CPU escalated really well and had 245 multicore performance. So every core escalated at 100% performance when multithreaded was required, which was pretty noiceable. All in all, i'd say that the main limiting factor for that CPU was the DDR2 platform of the AM2+ socket. But nevertheless it was a beast in multitasking scenarios for the era. We should recall that by 2008 having a 4 core CPU was an extreme solution for PCs, now in 2024 4 cores seems like too few, but all the software is prepared for them, back in the day having 4 cores in a single CPU felt almost like having 4 single core CPUs connected to a motherboard, since most soft wouldn't use more than 2 threads. Last but not least, i wouldn't have traded my phenom if not for the ram limit, but it was good to do that, since a Phenom II x4 with 8gb (and after an upgrade probably 16gb) would have had sticked with me up until 2020 or so, preventing me from the very reasonable upgrades that 2010's decade had to offer PD: now at 2024 i'm rocking an R7 5700x, i'm staying true to AMD, since it is the CPU brand for the average joes
Now I had an Athlon gaming system up until 2016 I upgraded it as far as I could on my stock motherboard and it was awful. But I loved it so much at the time I didn't know the difference. Though now if I built a system like this the likelihood of me having matching parts is extremely high and could get some nostalgia from it.
No afiliate link for the heatsink? These look a lot like the one included in my s939 4800x2 but with a bigger fan, can you post somewhere a picture of various AMD heatsinks... Or do a quick comparison video? BTW I really miss your 2 videos every week, hope everything is getting better for you. Thanks for so much and great content!
Man we really did improve IPC by 2.5-3X now my 3700X gets a 515-525 for ST in CPU-Z. PS4 and Xbox one saved these old CPU's as the consoles had terrible processors probably the most unbalanced gen in years.
I have a little pc for mid 2000's gaming with a phenom x4 9750+hd 5770 with 4gb of ddr2 on a cheap gigabyte board. It's pretty good as an alternative to the core 2 duos and quads for playing some older titles. I'd still give Intels core duo the win over these in terms of compatibility and performance, but at the time AMDs options were much cheaper than their Intel counterparts and made them a compelling option as the performance wasn't THAT bad. AMD was late on release, and the og phenoms had some issues, but most were resolved with the phenom 2 generation of cpus that released barely a year later of these cpus.
I had the same board I was able to pick up a MSI board and all was good. I do have a new in box FX 9590 I need to do something with later since the last one cooked after a year Great job
Great video Phil! One piece of advice though: try to use a video card with a maximum of 4gb of VRAM; on LGA775 and AM2 there is a limit at the maximum video memory that the chipset (Intel; Nvidia; AMD) supports! I remember I solved the BIOS problem through trial and error and determined that the video card was the culprit!
I'm still using a 2009 cpu as my daily driver, an i7-860. Still does what I need it to do so I have gotten over 11 years of use out of my ~$800 total. I feel I could get a few more years out of it if I upgrade to an ssd.
Had one of these briefly back in the day ended up swapping it out for a b97 found in a pre-built office machine. Better performance and less power. Be awesome if you covered the b97 as its kind of elusive to find
i converted my pink computer running phenom 2 b96 to ryzen half year ago and made it my daily driver most fun was repackaging off the shelve power suply into an odd shaped oem case and basically reversing motherboard brackets on the case (btx-to-atx) in the end i have hraphic card installed horisontally in a desktop computer with a fan facing the pcb of the motherboard and blocking access to expansion ports, with ssd underneth and encased with l shaped power suply. hdd cage in place of old case cooling stack and cpu in place where case had a vent holes for graphics :] (not to mention custom blower fans from 3lcd projector blowing air under the graphic card and power suply) i love how quirky my phenom replacement is and that it uses the same case, graphic card and dvd drive (which is white)
I like the video, keep it 💯 up. The thermal pad solution is a great idea. The last time I used this solution was with, wait for it. 486DX/66 Cpu's from Intel & cyrix a long time ago.
You will not be able to boot from drive plugged to card like this, so you can use it only for secondary drive. Or maybe I am wrong then please correct me.
@@mruczyslaw50 That's not true. I work for a NAS company and am surrounded by add-in SATA controllers every day. The ASM1061 is a great chipset. I also run a system that uses an add-in SATA/SAS card for a boot drive.
@@MarcoGPUtuber Ok, thanks for info. I thought it doesn't work because I used pci-e usb expansion cards and a usb stick plugged into pci-e card wasn't visible in bios but plugged directly into on-board usb I could boot from it just fine. Now I know that either my expansion card is poor or sata expansion cards are just connecting completely different with motherboard bios.
I remember that time, 2007-2009, where AMD struggled against Core2Duo and Quads. Back then even dualcore Intel CPUs were way better than anything AMD has to offer. Plus an overclock has made an AMD processor pretty useless.
I remember that time too and remember AMD dominating in the gaming arena. You clearly were trying to use intel optimized hardware with AMD cpus, if you ever really tried an AMD. Those of us that did and knew how to optimize them had the best gaming systems.
The heat these dumped out was something else at the time where almost everything else ran so much cooler though the rarer low watt versions were a lot easier to handle. All in all at the time I felt that AMD had the better platform as Core 2 was constrained by the FSB.
i love phenoms. i don't know why, i just like them so so much
For me its the nostalgia. I ran all AMD systems up until bulldozer made them unjustifiable. I'm very happy to see AMD back in the game.
Because they're Phenominal.
your not alone..lol still using a 1045t and a 720... the other newer cpu i'v tried was an ath-alone 5350...... all that did was make me like the phenoms even more! lol
But u r a brick xD
i love all old amd:S
Wow, glad to see the first Phenom gen here, my first PC build was a 9650 back in the day, still running at 2.7 8gb ram & a gt 1030 for older games & some newer that don't require those new instructions.
Great video, keep the good work :)
last year i had that too, now moved to the fx6300 :)
I love this channel!!! one of my favorites in all youtube.
I had one of these in 2008. Was a decent chip and with the South African currency not being so bad back then it was decently priced.
Love watching quality Aussie content. Thanks for all your work.
Have one of these, I agree pretty much with everything said. They haven't aged well, and the IPC simply isn't there. However as a daily driver it will do just fine. I recently built a retro 2005 PC with an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ and a Radeon X1800 XT, and it does HD video streaming, Facebook, messenger and any and all modern daily non-gaming tasks.
Not that I'd recommend either, obviously, but even my dual core Athlon doesn't hit anywhere near 100% CPU load during HD streaming, downloading AND FB Messenger chatting simultaneously.
Aged as well as the core 2 quads at the time. Its just to old. Cant expect much from a $220 12 year old CPU. I still run one of these in my media center. Probably going to retire it soon.
S939? :)
I have a bunch of amd hp computers with Phenom ii x4 b95 or Athlon ii x4 640 for under £25, they work quite well with windows 10
not sure why your having problems with nvidia chipset sata and ssds, but one note don't use AHCI use IDE/normal/legacy mode(depends what your bios says it is) as the AHCI I find is broken on pre bulldozer systems
I made a build with E7500, HD 4550 and 6 gb ddr2. With Arch Linux and an SSD I do browsing and youtube with very good performance. For XP games (dual boot with Linux) I can put 8800 GT or HD 3850 or 4850 or 6850. The mobo can allow a Q6600 which of course I have it.
My 4400+ got no problem for that with gt 730 (substitute gt 8800), and 2*2gb ddr2 800hz.
Hey, everyone, Phil's back!
Yea I'm doing a video every second week now... Life has been just too hectic :)
We appreciate your hard work, brother.
Wow. That puppy aged surprisingly well! I had the 9750 on my first build back in the day. Loved it. So many hours of Gmod and TS3 dumped into that thing.
I have a Phenom II x4 955 still in service. OS is LinuxMint 19.3.
I have a Phenom II X4 840 3.2GHz (because it was the best inexpensive upgrade for that box... 955 was too pricey!) ... far better than what it came with, but benches about 30% slower than the supposedly-slower 2.6GHz quadcore on that board's almost-twin, and you can see the difference in performance. Mine at least doesn't seem to be buggy; Win10 is exiled to that box and has been stable.
I got it a solid copper Adaptec heatsink, and that keeps it nicely cool. With AMD stock cooker, I mean cooler, I thought it was gonna melt.
@Gilson Marcondes Ladeira They where reverse compatible with AM2+
@@Reziac I've been using a Phenom II X4 840 on an ASRock A770DE+ MB for years. I probably built it in 2009 and It just refuses to die. All I've had to do was to replace one power supply, replace the clock battery and occasionally clean out the dust. I upgraded the boot drive to SSD a couple of years ago which was a must for day-to-day usability.
My main home system (non-gaming) is a Phenom II X4 810 on a GA-MA770T-UD3P motherboard. I've had it since, at least, 2009-2010 and it is a beast. I just, finally, maxed out the memory last month with 16 GB of G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series and gave it a new power supply, 600W EVGA. The only downside is this bastard is LOUD!!!
P.S. I'm running Linux Mint 19.1 Tessa.
Unlocked X3 425 into 4 cores and L3 cache, for a great price!
At the time of this CPU's release, I think I went with the Core 2 Duo, and being a broke student, I didn't have time to even look at the AMD equivalents of the time. Looking back now, I have a Phenom II build in part because I wanted a platform that was reasonably modern, but still had a chipset that could feature a native IDE port for working with those drives.
From what I could see, some of the arbitrary CPU instruction requirements seems more for the purpose of some kind of hardware level DRM enforcement more than it is that the game or program *needs* to run it there.
Well instructions per se are not helpful in the operation of DRM; however some modern DRM solutions including newer versions of Denuvo are built with these instructions necessarily utilised, so that's a problem.
never had a Phenom.....just the Phenom 2.....i heard weird stories about the original Phenom so i skipped it...anyway great video Phil..thanks for covering the original Phenom
Thanks for watching!
Reflashing BIOSes is a great idea to protect against bitrot.
Can you make a video on installing OSes on SATA drives through IDE converters? Not how, but the results.
I literally built this system 2 weeks ago, ran into all kinds of problems too. And actually switched to a Intel platform, 775 socket. I just wanted a windows 7 machine.
Yea 775 is heaps better.
775 with a 771 xeon is a good combo. X5450 or x5460
@@philscomputerlab It OCs better and parts have far better availability but stock performance for the programs that where available when these CPUs where a thing is pretty similar to there price competitors. Motherboards from this time period are pretty much all a pain in the arse regardless of platform. I would never recommend anything this old as anything but collectors items when i5 2400 systems can be had for under $100.
@@wowitsshit9734 Why bios flash?!
If it werent for the instructions set these cpu's could be and still are a'lot of fun to mess with sadly
games nowadays demand newer cpu with that said i still think these are great for old AAA titles
Have great a day sir :)
I have a Phenom II X2 555 BE @ X4 4GHz as an emergency platform (using it right now) and still runs games ok with GTX 980 Ti. The instruction problem is truly the worst problem on these :/
mnd I just love the fact that the dual cores could be turned into quad cores
It's time for the AMD FX Renaissance :)
I knew this wasn't going to be pretty. The Phenom series wasn't worth buying until the Phenom II showed up. But they haven't aged well for gaming, either, because they predate the latest instruction sets as well. If you want to game, the FX series is still good enough because they have all the instructions and plenty of cores, but not anything from the Phenom era.
Haha xeon x58 goes brrrrrr
I have to disagree. The Phenom II aged very well for gaming. I used a Phenom II X6 up until last year and even then only very few games used instruction sets that weren't supported by the phenom. Maybe the Assassin's Creed: Origin and newer episodes of the top of my head? And at that point the Phenom II was a 10 years old mid-range CPU It wouldn't have been a shame if it outright doesn't run anything. It'slike using a 133MHz Pentium MMX in 2005.
Yea, even the Phenom 2 is over now, the lack of sse3 kind of ended that one. Dead rising series and plenty after that started not bothering with old cpu support, so its not just a few at this point. They could patch it in but usually they don't bother.
FX has worse single thread performance and worse ipc than Phenom clock per clock, what a fucking non sense are you talking about? It doesn't even have all true cores... If Ryzen didn't released, AMD would be bankrupted for 3 years!!!
hmm I see someone I see on quora in the youtube comments. Interesting
Phenoms were great bang for the buck. I built a hexacore Phenom II 1100T system that was a great media centre and passively cooled.
I must say the price was pretty decent :)
Passively Cooled??!!! I want to see that cooler It must be huge!
Oh yeah, a 6 core CPU that lost against an Intel 4 core and aged terribly by comparison. Great buy! I though AMD was smoking when I saw the prices of those back in the day...
hmmm not really...you can get a z77 with a 2500k for 70-90€....this performs two or three times faster than the phenoms...these cpus still out of order! its doesnt make any sense..a q6600 performs better than this
@@Knebebelmeyer 'Were' my friend. Were.
Love the Friday because Phil is uploaded new video
Very cool. Kinda the forerunner to my Ryzen 3 1300x.
Another great video Phil, thanks a lot. My progression as cpus go was 486 sx 33, 486 dx 50, Pentium III, athlon xp, athlon 64, then I went to a mobile core i7 first gen, back to desktop i7 2600k, back to mobile intel crap, and now I'm very happy to rock a R7 1800x since 2018 and for many more years.
i started with a 386dx40 ( amd ) then to 486DX33 , 486dx2-66 , K5-133 , Cyrix 166, Pentium II 400, athlon Thunderbird 800 , Phenon 9950( working every day at my mother inlaw, A10 7850k ( now with the wife) and finally ryzen 1700 ( my own pc ) also have working laptop panasonic thoughbook with a I5
Those nforce 680i and 580 will die without active cooling like a chipset fan. I have a lot of dead SLi motherboards with dead chipsets or memory channels because of this.
On what Boards?
I got the same board in the video. They sure did run hot. I rigged up a thermalrite tower cooler to the chipset and it still ran in the 60s, but better than mid 90s if was with the stock active cooling.
I have tons of dead Socket A/462 boards with fried chipsets or bloated capacitors, the bloated capacitors boards are awaiting repairs and the fried chipset boards are being used as spare part boards, or just being recycled.
I have evga 680i Sli with broken ethernet and one pcie slot that doesnt work. Owerheating gargabe couldnt Oc q6600 when it was new. I didnt sell it cos I didnt want people to hate me.
@Martin M Fun thing I have Asrock nforce2 Agp Am2+ mobo with ddr2 support ( I bought it for retro Pc to test Agp cards with phenom 9550) and it works great. On 680i sli Ethernet stoped working after 2 years, for Pcie slot I dont know did he ever worked I tried it in 2014 for fun and just 1 works (new bios, q6600, 8gb ddr2...)
I had a Phenom configuration until i saw your review of x79 platforms and made myself a pretty solid gaming PC. It served me verily for 12 years! So thanks a lot! I was even able to play Witcher 3 on my old faithful Phenom!
Wow, that must be the most colorful mono I've seen in a long time.
Great video... you should consider doing a video with a MiSTer running the ao486 core with an MT-32... that sounds right up your alley and would make for a very entertaining video, cheers
I still have a 9850 Black Edition that can overclock to 3.1Ghz which did very well for a while but oh my God that power consumption!
I had this one back in the day! Before upgrading to the X965 which I still got in a holiday home in my second PC!
I had it overclocked to around 2.9Ghz on the stock cooler, great over clockers better than the Phenom 2!
Phenom ii is a bit different beast to overclock. Pushing multiplier and cranking Vcore will get you almost non performance,only thing you will generate is heat. In term of pushing just frequency Phenom and Phenom ii are more or less similar in percentage.
I had built a Phenom x3 8450e system back in the late 00s. Ran it for the longest time before upgrading to a FX-6300, now on a properly modern Ryzen 3600. Back in 2008 people weren't as concerned about getting 60FPS in games as they are today.
Phil, when I saw the title for this video I remembered the i7-920. It was a legendary CPU back in the day and it has 4C8T, which is not totally obsolete right now. I would love it if you could look at the i7-920 one day, especially with a moderate overclock to 3.4 or 3.6 GHz.
Hey Phil those Asus board were always like that. A big headache for me.
The NF chip is fairly good, and performance seemed low to me that it should have been. Alway good to have available a strip array to get beyond that single drive performance.
Usually what I did was install on the secondary chip. And find the nforceware, and gart drivers as the chips set won't install any options and is not "default" compatible.
THE BAD NEWS..
Hence it appears you've tested with a disabled system. No chipset running/drivers.
All your " not working and problems" seem to be all that it is.
Nforce software you cannot get from Nvidia website any more but you should be able to track one down.
If you can find a later version that 1.1 it can and sometimes is a good or bad experience. As some things worked better and some worse depending on what you had.
I am always amazed at how good Linux is for old hardware and new hardware alike.
One of my Uncles is still using his X4 since he built it in 2009. I cleaned it a couple times throughout the years for him & recently added an SSD to it for him which helped a lot. But for him since he does not play any Modern Games it is ok for him for now but not much longer because his motherboard also only supports 4 Gigs of RAM. I have been trying to talk him into building a Ryzen System, even the first or second generation Ryzen would be fine for him.
Oh boy, a Phenom 1. Given the microcode bugs, everyone thought these were comparatively bad, until Bulldozer launched. But at least Bulldozer was stable ... :P
What? Mine has always been extremely stable.
@@geonerd They released a microcode update that disabled the offending functionality. Basically, one of the architectural features was bugged, so they had to slow down the processor a bit to get it to work properly.
The 9950 is a B3 stepping chip. No TLB bug present.
@moofree Only 3 Phenom of the first series have this problem not all of them! But AMD has fixed that Ploblem fast! The most problems of the AM2-Plattform comes form bad designed Motherboards like from ASUS, ASRock, WinFast, Chaintech and SOYO!
By the way... K10-Cores of Phenom are basically the same in the Bulldozer-CPU! The K10's are just not modular, have less cache, dont have the Datalink between L2 and L3 cache and on a small note! So what are you talking about?!
@@geonerd Same, I had both Phenom and Phenom II CPU's and never had any problems. In fact my Phenom II 975 @4Ghz was with me until the Ryzen series came out and I upgraded to a R7 1700X, which is still rocking today :D
My desktop is still using an AM3+ Phenom II x4 965 3.4ghz. Still works great, but when I update to an AM5 socket Ryzen in the far future, I'll keep it for a retro-gaming PC build. :)
Yea Phenom II ist heaps better...
@@philscomputerlab It's a solid CPU that's served me well for over a decade. :) RAM hungry, however.
PC hardware prices have skyrocketed due to COVID-19 causing shortages of parts. I went with a used part build, I am using a Intel Core I5 4690K 4.0 GHz OC, 16 GB DDR3 RAM, MSI GTX 1050 TI, 500GB SSD, 2TB HDD, Windows 10.
@@pentiummmx2294 It's kind of ironic: a lot of cheap PC parts come from China by either being salvaged, second-hand, or reproductions of older hardware types, and it's because of China producing the WuFlu that prices have spiked to ridiculous levels.
"~May you live in interesting times" indeed...
i picked up a beige box pc for 20 bucks with an athlon 64 X2 4800+ (2006), using it for an xp machine playing around with my old pci-e cards. currently got a 9800gtx+ in it, waiting for an Athlon II X2 255 3.1GHz from 2009 to arrive which was 8 bucks on ebay. i hope the improvement is worth while! do you have any game recommendations from those years? thanks again for the vids :)
Nice video Phil. Looking forwards to the next one!!
Thank you!
I might buy a phenom CPU soon. That would be a huge upgrade from a 2 cores Athlon 5200+.
I want to buy a phenom too, for upgrading my athlon 6000+
yep me too
@@IJoeAceJRI maybe some people dont have the money to completely rebuild there systems
@@IJoeAceJRI Dude not everyone have deep pockets, honestly i fully understand those people, especially when you are student and cant work normal jobs yet so you have to make do whatever you have.
@@IJoeAceJRI why i have to spend a lot of money in a ney system, if i can buy a 15€ cpu and use it for my necesities, like basic gaming and ofimatic task
I had to check but I had that exact same 125W CPU, the exact same motherboard, and the exact same RAM. Definitely had a different GPU though, I first had a GTX 260 then I got a GT 740 that I got at a pawn shop for $5. Sadly my motherboard died to unknown causes about a year ago but it worked great for a really long time. If boards weren't so pricy I would probably rebuild it as a WinXP machine or something along those lines.
Nice video, as always. I had a phenom 9850 in november 2008 with the ASUS M3A32 MVP, although the SB600 on it is SATA-2 it works with SATA-3 HDD and SSD without issues. Upgraded to a Phenom II 940 six months later, cooler and faster. It still works, but not as a gaming PC.
Edit: I remember having issues with a 9800GTX after making changes in the BIOS, after rebooting it didn't POST (the GPU fan kept spinning fast), I had to switch off the PSU because the reset button didn't work, only happened with that GPU.
As someone who was using a Phenom II x6 OC i must say, it does not hold well. The lack of instructions do make it perform terrible on modern systems.
I use a Phenom II x6 in my XP box. Overclocked it to 4ghz even. Got a board with DDR3 1600, USB3, SSDs plus an AMD HD 6970 and an Audigy XFi, it's lacks nothing at all :)
for office stuff or many esports / online games a phenom II is still good enough
@@DyceFreak Mine had 32GB of DDr3 1600 OK to 3.9 GHZ and a RX 570 8gb and a WD 500GB SSD.. I must say, it could not run the games i wish nor play YT on 1080p 60fps
Yeah, that's the problem. Lack of sse 4.1 unlike core 2 duo/quads.
Sse 4.2 is lacking too
For a gamer its probably obsolete, but for a developer (my case) - not a single issue and performance is just great. I have PII x6 1055 @3.5Ghz
Great video as Usual, Phil! Thank you man, you're making my quarantine easier. Thinking at loud, did you ever consider to include some performance analysis in video rendering? I remember myself a couple of decades ago dreaming about building a fast P4 to encode some movies to DivX... I think it would be a nice retro review haha
Hey Phil, thanks for videos. Makes me want to fire up the old Phenom II B55. Where did you get your test bench? I'm struggling to find a decent one.
For the test bench, search for High Speed PC!
I love my phenom ii x6. Of course on more modern games i prefer my fx 8350. But i don't know about crysis. I played it on athlon 64 x2 3800+ with a radeon hd 3850 and i remember that at 1280*1024 it run smoothly.
I bought an AMD Athlon II X3 425 back in 2010, since I'd read that many of those could unlock the 4th core and cache (so effectively change it to a Phenom II CPU). It worked really well (using mainboard Asus M4A785TD-V EVO) (I think it was unlocked to "Phenom II X4 B25"), so I felt I got a lot for my money :-) A few years later I upgraded to a used Phenom II X6 1055t (I had set the computer to be used as a Plex- and file-server, running Linux and ZFS). The CPU and motherboard supported ECC memory, which is recommended for ZFS. This computer has been running 24/7 until last week, when I finally upgraded to a Ryzen-based system (Ryzen 9 3900X). The Phenom II X6 system still works flawlessly though, so I will probably find some use for it (maybe a backup server).
Like before view, that's the faith I have in your videos
I use a Phenom II 1055t x6 with an Asus M4A87TD/USB3 motherboard. I love this cpu.
Why is my comment the only one not liked by Phil?🤪
Before watching this video i quickly checked this cpu at passmark charts and after watching this episode i was very impressed how well it ran new tomb raider games, interesting cpu, too bad your motherboard was crapping itself :D
I have a Phenom-based pc in my closet that I used for close to a decade. it served me well.
That peak power usage just cooled me doooooooooown...
Oh wow! This means my PC is already considered a collectors item!
vélinho de guerra kkkkkk, tb tenho um 9850 black edition, estou usando ele agora kkkkk
O meu é um athlon ii x2 240 hahahaha
Mas mais ou menos a msm idade
I have an OG phenom media center PC that my grandfather bought to use as a DVR when it was brand new. It still runs as a plex server :)
I waited and got the Phenom 2 965 BE. I had come from a Core Duo. I will say the 965 BE performed great and was my main rig for 7 years or so. I made a big mistake and got a fairly cheap i5 6400 in 2015 and switched back to the 965 BE (overclocked the snot out of it) as the i5 6400 felt slow and stodgy. Got a Ryzen 1600 a year and a half later and retired the 965 BE to a kids computer where it still does a competent job. Definitely got my money's worth. I have owned 30 or so computers of Intel and AMD make over my many years but I have never been so unimpressed with a chip as I was with the i5 6400. Over all Intel and AMD have been good to me but dang that i5!
I had a phenom 9820 for a long time, it really wasn't a great cpu. It chugged on game then, and didn't oc at all. The phenom II X4 940 I replaced it with was a big performance bump, and oc like a dream. Plus quite a few including mine you could unlock the additional 1-2 cores with the right chip and board.
I remember seeing these in magazines when they came out and they just weren't as optimized for most games and software. Atleast not compared to Intel at the time with the Core series. I had a AMD Athlon 64X2 6400+ at the time in 2008 and didn't upgrade until 2013 for the FX 8350 and 2019 for the Ryzen 2600.
@bullseyestrat: It's not the CPU that is not optimized it's the games fault for not having support for multi core. Intel can't be that grate considering that they can't make a half decent GPU to run anything besides software render.
Damn, that board is fried Phil
Yea I threw it out in the end...
In my opinion, the best use would be an XP game machine or under Windows 10, simply a browser/word processor paired with a GT 210 or similar video card.
i have used that cpu for many year and now i use phenom II x6 1055t but the 9950 have a special place on my heart
i had one of those, gave it away and still works almost every day. i upgraded to a ryzen 1700 in 2018
I had one of these for a while back in the day. It was the 140 W version, and with a proper AMD chipset like the 790FX, it performed quite decently for the price (I got it on sale for about NZ$300). I ran it at 3.0 GHz, which was the limit, since the first-gen Phenoms really weren't good overclockers.
Its biggest issue was the lack of SSE3 instructions, which proved to be a problem even then, especially when it comes to emulation. This is why I replaced it with the LGA 1366 platform and a cheap Xeon E5506 ES CPU (4C/4T, 2.13 GHz) soon after, which easily clocked to 3.2 GHz and could compete favorably against the top-end Core 2 Quads like the QX9650.
Look at my post.
Family computer had a Pentium D when I was a kid, but then went straight for budget Athlon II as a teen. Processor did absolutely everything fine for years, I didn't even bother changing the thermal paste for like 5 years, at that point it was all gone haha. It was even performing "OK" when I got a GPU updgrade, especially with a 10% overcklock. It's a bit of a shame the overclocking on those chips is so complicated with North Bridge, HT Link speed etc. If it was as easy as intel - just put the multiplier up, you could've easily push that thing to 4Ghz probably...
Owned the Phenom 9600 back in the day. I made it my routine daily to disable the TLB patch that reduced performance. Never once did I run into the bug that would cause the CPU to crash with the patch off.
I admit during the time it may have been wiser to have a faster dual-core than a quad-core, but overall I never had an issue running any games up until 2012.
Overall though it was the most eye opening experience I ever had going from a Low-End even when it was built Socket A Sempron 2500+ to the Phenom 9600. Even with my modern day pc no upgrade has replicated that experience.
It took him two weeks to releasr a video. I think hes busy for so many reasons.. i always wait for a retro pc review 😊
honestly i enjoy cpu reviews the most, why? Because they are so different from each other and every generation from either intel or amd have its interesting points, whether its core count, clock speed, architecture, ram speed, overclocking capabilities. With gpus its kinda straight forward and very consistent in most cases, most of the time just looking at few graphs you can calculate approximately how it will run for all games and resolutions. I know its pain to test cpus but for me its the most interesting point in these benchmarks.
If I recall correctly, there was a pretty bad Branch Prediction Unit in the Phenom I series of CPUs causing performance to suffer greatly when patched via firmware. It is my understanding that this bug was fixed in the Phenom II series of CPUs which allowed them to perform much better than the previous generation. I'd be curious to see you comparing the two to see if there's any performance differences between the two platforms.
I've built a few phenom systems lately, good for classic gaming and general use.
I used to have the socket 775 version of this motherboard and it used to give me problems.
From what I've seen, SATA3 SSD drives can be used with older boards that only support SATA 1 or 2. You just wouldn't get the full performance of the SSD.
Last year my daily driver broke down and for few days I had to use an old workstation - unclocked Phenom II x2 555, 6 GB RAM, SSD and integrated HD3000. Windows worked very sluggishly on this, but after installing minimal Debian 9.9 with LXDE from scratch I was very positively surprised. Working with ~10 pages running in the Firefox (incl. 2x YT 720p) and Sublime Text 3 simultaneously was comfortable and fluent, on some "ancient" properitary driver even the desktop worked in FHD without issues.
I still have some love for the 2nd gens. My build back then was a Phenom II 955be , had a gtx 480 and I used a HAF9(something)5 full tower, 850w Corsair PSU, and my first USB SSD(that is still in use for the PC I am using now amazingly, outlasting 4 platter drives). I am surprised the 9950 even held up that good. There was quite a difference between Phenom and Phenom II.
Phil I’ve used a few of these chipsets and I feel like the best way to fix them is to toss them straight into the bin and replace them with something else. I’m not one to give up easily but obviously someone cut some corners somewhere on these.
Interesting video Phil, thanks for taking the time even if you can't recommend the CPU.
Great video as always. I have one of those cpus but unfortunately it’s the 140w version and a lot of boards from that timeframe only support up to 95 or 125 as you said. You’re right about your recommendation- probably better to go with something like a q6600... or a phenom 2. The 95w 945 is faster, cooler and cheaper. And more compatible.
my mobo only supports up to 95w. the Athlon II X4 640 works fine with it, it has 4 cores and has 3.0 GHz clock, but no L3 cache unfortunately.
@@pentiummmx2294 Would either of you recommend upgrading to a 945/955 (95W) or B95/B97 today? I found a 955 for $11 shipped and it's the max cpu my mobo can handle. Unfortunately, I think my mobo is also limited to 2x2GB DDR2-800/1066 (might take 2x4GB DDR2-800, but not sure) and a PCIe x16 v1.1 slot lol.
Not sure if my AM2+ K8 stock cooler will be sufficient for it. That would be another $20 or so for a CoolerMaster Hyper 212 Evo. Also stuck w a generic 4-pin cpu power PSU that's served me well so far (through static arc shutdowns through the usb port multiple times and a lightning strike that arced into my breaker box lol).
Either that or ~$80 to upgrade to an Intel DH67CL w i5-3570 and a cheapo 500W PSU.
Ho-Yaw!!! I'm still running an All-Phenom lineup. My main desktop is a 6x 'Thuban' and my 'workstation' is a 2 socket Opteron with 24 cores! A third Phenom 4x gets occasional use as a media ripper and host for my ancient parallel-port Laserjet printer. Itching for a 16 core Ryzen, or maybe even a TR if the price slips a little lower later this year.
How do them 24 core opterons compare to something like 3900x?
Seeing Just Cause 4 running on this made my jaw drop. My computer meets the min. requirements and refuses to run even with an RX 5700 XT paired with it. Crazy! As for what this can run eh there are enough in the backlog4life that could play on this and for the right price I would want this build. My brother had an AMD Phenom based system or maybe it was Phenom II. I'd like to see what gaming was like for him with what he used. Anyway to finish up like you said this is for collector's item and that fits what I want it for. Also on that note what would be the top card one would pair with the Phenom X4 9950BE at the time it was out? It would be nice to have the right video card too for it. Finally in regards to the Kingspec SSDs you have used for a year or two what is the oldest socket cpu paired with mobo do these SSDs or any SSD run with? Still haven't ever used one in a pc and wouldn't mind trying at a very cheap price.
Hi Phil, interesting cpu and makes me wonder why amd chose the names that they did because I bought a phenom 2 955 black edition in 2009. Going from 9950 to 955 is odd to me. Anyway thanks for the review. I really loved these CPUs back in the day, competing vs Intel before the fx series happened.
Imagine running a game in 2010 using a processor from 1998!!
i had that CPU for a spam of about 2 year as main rig, exactly from 2013 to 2016...
What i can recall is that i upgraded my rig to an Fx8350 since my AM2+ mobo only had 2 slots of ram and 4gb sticks of DDR2 were pretty rare and costly. and also, i went for an AMD cpu since i had a bad experience with Pentium 4 and Celeron D cpus, so i wanted to stick in AMD's platform. Finally, i went for the Fx8350 since i went to the Phenom 9950 from a Celeron D, and the 4 core improvement over the low tier "D" was massive, and i figured that i wanted an 8 core CPU since multitasking was a huge deal for me, i didn't care that i3 6100 could score more fps in some games compared to the Fx, i wanted the raw multitasking performance, and i really enjoyed that feature.
As for the Phenom X4 9950 BE i recall it having 65 singlescore performance on cinebench R15, a number that was low by 2016 standars with intel 6th gen already released...
But on the other hand CPU escalated really well and had 245 multicore performance. So every core escalated at 100% performance when multithreaded was required, which was pretty noiceable.
All in all, i'd say that the main limiting factor for that CPU was the DDR2 platform of the AM2+ socket. But nevertheless it was a beast in multitasking scenarios for the era. We should recall that by 2008 having a 4 core CPU was an extreme solution for PCs, now in 2024 4 cores seems like too few, but all the software is prepared for them, back in the day having 4 cores in a single CPU felt almost like having 4 single core CPUs connected to a motherboard, since most soft wouldn't use more than 2 threads.
Last but not least, i wouldn't have traded my phenom if not for the ram limit, but it was good to do that, since a Phenom II x4 with 8gb (and after an upgrade probably 16gb) would have had sticked with me up until 2020 or so, preventing me from the very reasonable upgrades that 2010's decade had to offer
PD: now at 2024 i'm rocking an R7 5700x, i'm staying true to AMD, since it is the CPU brand for the average joes
That cpu is sick
I have a Phenom 9550 until this year. When the motherboard broke. But i still have the processor. I like it
Now I had an Athlon gaming system up until 2016 I upgraded it as far as I could on my stock motherboard and it was awful. But I loved it so much at the time I didn't know the difference. Though now if I built a system like this the likelihood of me having matching parts is extremely high and could get some nostalgia from it.
No afiliate link for the heatsink? These look a lot like the one included in my s939 4800x2 but with a bigger fan, can you post somewhere a picture of various AMD heatsinks... Or do a quick comparison video? BTW I really miss your 2 videos every week, hope everything is getting better for you. Thanks for so much and great content!
AFAIK I got them from Amazon! Yea I cannot do weekly video, every 2 weeks works well for me at the moment :)
Man we really did improve IPC by 2.5-3X now my 3700X gets a 515-525 for ST in CPU-Z.
PS4 and Xbox one saved these old CPU's as the consoles had terrible processors probably the most unbalanced gen in years.
I used to rock a phenom 965 black.
I still have and use this procesor
I have a little pc for mid 2000's gaming with a phenom x4 9750+hd 5770 with 4gb of ddr2 on a cheap gigabyte board. It's pretty good as an alternative to the core 2 duos and quads for playing some older titles. I'd still give Intels core duo the win over these in terms of compatibility and performance, but at the time AMDs options were much cheaper than their Intel counterparts and made them a compelling option as the performance wasn't THAT bad. AMD was late on release, and the og phenoms had some issues, but most were resolved with the phenom 2 generation of cpus that released barely a year later of these cpus.
I had the same board I was able to pick up a MSI board and all was good. I do have a new in box FX 9590 I need to do something with later since the last one cooked after a year Great job
I am curious if you could use a PCI based ssd, with an adapter to go to a regular desktop size socket on such an old system.
Cool phenom experience 😁😁😁😁😁
Great video Phil! One piece of advice though: try to use a video card with a maximum of 4gb of VRAM; on LGA775 and AM2 there is a limit at the maximum video memory that the chipset (Intel; Nvidia; AMD) supports! I remember I solved the BIOS problem through trial and error and determined that the video card was the culprit!
I'm still using a 2009 cpu as my daily driver, an i7-860. Still does what I need it to do so I have gotten over 11 years of use out of my ~$800 total. I feel I could get a few more years out of it if I upgrade to an ssd.
Had one of these briefly back in the day ended up swapping it out for a b97 found in a pre-built office machine. Better performance and less power. Be awesome if you covered the b97 as its kind of elusive to find
i converted my pink computer running phenom 2 b96 to ryzen half year ago and made it my daily driver
most fun was repackaging off the shelve power suply into an odd shaped oem case and basically reversing motherboard brackets on the case (btx-to-atx)
in the end i have hraphic card installed horisontally in a desktop computer with a fan facing the pcb of the motherboard and blocking access to expansion ports, with ssd underneth and encased with l shaped power suply.
hdd cage in place of old case cooling stack and cpu in place where case had a vent holes for graphics :] (not to mention custom blower fans from 3lcd projector blowing air under the graphic card and power suply) i love how quirky my phenom replacement is and that it uses the same case, graphic card and dvd drive (which is white)
I like the video, keep it 💯 up.
The thermal pad solution is a great idea. The last time I used this solution was with, wait for it.
486DX/66 Cpu's from Intel & cyrix a long time ago.
Hey Phil! What about a PCIe SATA III card? A lot of the recent ones are problem free
You will not be able to boot from drive plugged to card like this, so you can use it only for secondary drive. Or maybe I am wrong then please correct me.
Yea I only have ones for retro computers it seems :D
@@philscomputerlab ASM1061 SATA III cards are extremely cheap on Aliexpress. Windows happily boots off them too.
@@mruczyslaw50 That's not true. I work for a NAS company and am surrounded by add-in SATA controllers every day. The ASM1061 is a great chipset. I also run a system that uses an add-in SATA/SAS card for a boot drive.
@@MarcoGPUtuber Ok, thanks for info. I thought it doesn't work because I used pci-e usb expansion cards and a usb stick plugged into pci-e card wasn't visible in bios but plugged directly into on-board usb I could boot from it just fine. Now I know that either my expansion card is poor or sata expansion cards are just connecting completely different with motherboard bios.
I remember that time, 2007-2009, where AMD struggled against Core2Duo and Quads. Back then even dualcore Intel CPUs were way better than anything AMD has to offer. Plus an overclock has made an AMD processor pretty useless.
I hear that.
I remember that time too and remember AMD dominating in the gaming arena. You clearly were trying to use intel optimized hardware with AMD cpus, if you ever really tried an AMD. Those of us that did and knew how to optimize them had the best gaming systems.
Hello I have phenom 955. And few days ago I pair it with GTX 750ti, 8 GB ram 1600mhz. And SSD sata 120...
DDR2 4GB AMD-only modules are abundant on aliexpress, and very cheap. So, you can easily have 16GB of ram with this conf.
I remember having one of these with a 3870x2 . Still have it in my part cupboard
The heat these dumped out was something else at the time where almost everything else ran so much cooler though the rarer low watt versions were a lot easier to handle. All in all at the time I felt that AMD had the better platform as Core 2 was constrained by the FSB.
My Aunt is still using a Phenom II X4 940 with 8GB DDR3 1066 in her desktop - seems to be all she needs.
You should try playing with the power profiles more and try using the ultimate mode to see if it even makes any difference.
Hello everyone, if I want to try on 3d modeling or vfx industry like working on Blender but has limited budget, is RX 570 a good start? Thanks.