Phenom II X2 550 - AM3 CPU Review

Welcome to PCWizKidsTechTalk. Today, I'm going to show you the new Phenom II X2 550. This one here is a dual core black edition CPU from AMD. It’s 3.1 GHz out of the box default and it’s an AM3 socket CPU of course the new ones, 45 nanometer architecture and it’s using 80W maximum here power. That’s the type of CPU that we’re talking about here but because it’s an overclock capable CPU we’re going to take it further. Also I like the fact that this one comes with 6 Megs of level three cache. You need as much level three cache as possible if really want to push it in a system like this one that I have.

So were going to install this here and run some benchmarks and see how we do. Now first things first, at default clock speeds nothing overclock yet we’re getting about 18 degrees Celsius, 19 degrees Celsius with no load. Windows 7 RTM 64 bit that’s what I'm running this on and if you run it up full load it’s about 27 degrees max on full load without it being overclock 3.1 GHz okay. Now what are your options to overclocking?

Well, you’ve got two really. The first one is to run the AMD overdrive utility and I did that in a game with 3.5 GHz automatically. Then I've tried it again doing the BIOS settings manually. So I set the multipliers, set the bus bit, set the voltage and I got 3.8 GHz out of this.

So in CPU Z you can see here the 3.8 GHz was achieved, the 1.4V core CPU’s voltage and there is the multiplier. There's the bus bit that I set in the BIOS and I got 3.8 GHz. Okay that’s it. That’s all I had to do and then everything else took care of itself and of course I've got the memory slightly overclock as well as you can see here with the following memory timings. Okay, now base on that information here at a overclock I got these results in 3DMark 06. Okay so for those of you interested in these dual cores Phenom II, I got these results from the CPU core, 3024 and in 3DMark vantage here are the scores again on the performance benchmark and the CPU score was 6049. What does that means?

Well it s obviously faster than the new Athlon that just came out. It’s not as fast as a Q80-400 or the 810 Phenom Quad core. It is close to the triple core from the Phenom line. So the Phenom II 720 that I reviewed but then again this one is running for about $100.00 right now. So, when we run some benchmark and some games to see how it behaves with the HD 4770 video card. It did very well. I must admit overall I was impressed because it did not hold back the video. It did not hold back in bottleneck or anything. It did actually work smoothly when I run some high settings so I am not just trying to push the video card here.

I am trying to see if it will even run smoothly at 1280 x 1024 with this dual core CPU and it did. As you can see here from all these frames per seconds that I'm forgetting, very, very decent and awesome results from this CPU like I said. Right now going for about $100.00 US probably will come down in price mostly likely because of the new Phenom II X4965 that just came out.

So there you go, if you are looking for a Phenom II with some great results you might want to try this one and I like to thank AMD for providing it. I hope you enjoyed this video and thank you for watching.