bit-tech Shopping: AMD Phenom 9600 Quad-Core Processor

Rating: 8

Time with product: 1 Month

Strengths: Plug and play, greatly improves multitasking

Weaknesses: High power consumption, lack of applications capable of exploiting multicore architecture, cost

Summary: With these 3-and 4-core CPUs, hardware has definitely skipped a few steps ahead of software...again. Don't expect this to improve frame rates in most PC games, but it will improve performance if you commonly multitask several major applications at once, as I frequently do. High power draw necessitates a muscular power supply, especially if you also have a cutting-edge graphics card. Ultimately a chip like this could somewhat future-proof a machine, provided we either get an operating system or apps which can really leverage the multicore capabilities.

Rating: 10

Time with product: 90 Days

Strengths: i) reasonable price for a quad core ; ii) unlocked multiplier ; iii) fast speed

Weaknesses: none so far

Summary: It is relatively cheap among the quad cores. Though compared with Intel, it worked a little slower, it is still good for the price. It works much much faster than my old dual core CPU when it comes to the graphic tasks like photoshops and huge 3D games. Also, it didn't give off much heat, so no special requirement for your cooling systems. Finally, it is very stable, and I haven't meed blue screen or auto restart problem yet.

Rating: 8

Time with product: 60 Days

Strengths: 1. Low price2. Cool n Quiet

Weaknesses: 1. TLB patch causes slowdown in WinRar2. Not very overclockable

Summary: This processor is frequently available at a very low price point which makes it a much better choice than other quad or tri processors.The TLB patch does take away some performance. However, due to the quad core, your system will be much smoother.I am using this processor with an Asus M2A-VM motherboard as a file server/virtual machine server. This quad core will easily run 6 VM's (1GB ram each) very smoothly.

Rating: 6

Time with product: 1 Month

Strengths: quad-core; reliable brand; reasonable price

Weaknesses: Not much better than Athlon X2 6400";

Summary: For sure,this is the first quad-core CPU technically speaking. But as to the performance, I don't think it works better than the Athlon X2 6400. Maybe the job I'm doing could not make a difference between the two.

Rating: 8

Time with product:

Strengths: 1. Quad-core processor for a low price.2. Unlocked multiplier.

Weaknesses: 1. The TLB bug fix slows down the speed.2. Not very overclockable.

Summary: Equipped with ECS A780GM-A and works pretty fine. I haven't measured the performance with the TLB bug fix disabled since I'm pretty satisfied with current speed. I've watched 1080P movies with total CPU utilization below 50% (hardware hd decode disabled of course). This processor comes with multiplier unlocked, so I can try overclocking it without worrying about any other components. But unfortunately the limit I can reach is only 2.7GHz even with 10% Vcore increase.