AMD Phenom II X4 810 Review

Release of the first 45nm quad core AMD processors - Phenom II 940 and 920 in the beginning of the year was the most important event for the company and was the first significant success for the company processor division in quite a while. The new processors offered splendid performance for their price, and users still could use them with their good old cheap AM2/AM2+ motherboards along with their also old and cheap DDR2 memory. Now it's time to review the first AMD processor supporting the new AM3 platform, namely - AMD Phenom II 810 with operational frequency of 2.6GHz and very budget orientated price.

In the past we've made tests of the Phenom X4 series, 9850, 9950 and 940 to be precise. Before, 940 it was just unfair to compare quad core Phenom processors with Intel's Penryn processors. And quite understandable indeed - 65nm Phenoms had problems with energy efficiency and cooling, which directly reflected on their operating frequency, but Phenom II however managed to solve these issues without aiming for top performance, while still offering good price/performance ratio. And you know what? AMD kept working in that direction.

As you might know, ever since the още Athlon64 series onwards, all AMD processors have integrated in them a memory controller, which does provides a hefty performance boost for requests to the system memory and as whole is the perfect solution, still at the same time using different types of memory (for example - DDR, DDR2 or DDR3) is a tad problematic and does require change of processor with one having the appropriate memory controller. But changing the whole platform for a memory working at few hundred megahertz more is not justified, thus AMD considered somewhat different approach with AM3. Phenom II AM2/AM2+ and the new Phenom II AM3 are essentially identical, save the fact that the new AM3 processors have both DDR2 and DDR3 controllers in them. Meaning that AMD Phenom II 810 AM3, as well as the other released so far AM3 processors like Phenom II 920 and 940, are completely compatible with older AM2 and АМ2+ motherboard - everything you need to to do in order to run this processor with the motherboard you use for an year, year and a half now is to flash it with the latest BIOS. It's that simple.

ON each photo Phenom II 940 is on the right and Phenom II 810 AM3 is on the left

But Phenom II 920 and 940 have only DDR2 controller and therefore are unfit for the AM3 platform. The socket of АМ2/АМ2+ has 941 pin, while the one of AM3 has 3 less - 938. As you can see on the photo above the 3 pin more that AM2 processor has (as seen on the Phenom II 940 on the second photo on the right) prevents them being fitted in AM3 socket. Our colleagues from Tom's Hardware had already experimented by removing the 3 obstructing pins and installed the processor on a motherboard with AM3 socket and DDR3 memory, yet to no avail - the system did not worked at all, showing that indeed Phenom II 920/940 have no DDR3 controller. On the other hand the processor still worked just fine even without these 3 pin on a normal AM2+ motherboard, which for us means simply that the pins are not in fact needed and were removed in order to prevent users from attempting this stunt by themselves.

Shortly after the release of the new AM3 platform, AMD announced that they will discontinue manufacturing Phenom II 920 and 940 processors and the 925 and 945 will be the ones to replace them, being identical at frequency, cache and other characteristics, while they'll have a DDR3 memory controller and thus will be AM3 compatible. And now let's review the whole 45nm AMD processor line released so far:

Few things need to be noted on to. The only difference between Phenom II 8xx and 9xx models is in the L3 cache. In 8xx it is 4MB (2MB less than in 9xx). And although the first 45nm three core processors released along with Phenom II 805 and 810 are officially marked as "Heka", they are indeed "Deneb" ones with one suspended core. A little bug along their release though was the cause of great unrest - a bug in the BIOS of AMD motherboards allowing Advanced Clock Calibration (ACC) could unlock the 4th core of the processor (provided it's not damaged in any way), sadly though shortly after all the noise raised in the media about the bug, AMD obligated all motherboard manufacturers to implement a BIOS fix.

Without going into further detail let's go on with information about the methods and configuration we used to test the Phenom II 810.