Review-Phenom II X4 980 Processor: AMD’s Fastest Quad Core CPU is Here!

Left 4 Dead 2 – The Sacrifice

Left 4 Dead 2 is the sequel to the original Left 4 Dead action game. It’s built around the relatively old source engine which dates back to Half-Life 2 in 2004. However, because it is highly dependent on overall system performance, this game can still be used to measure out the performance of today’s processor.
For our testing purposes, the graphics settings are set to their lowest positions and the resolution is scaled down to 1024×768 to minimize graphics card influence on the final results.

There is almost no difference at all between all the processor in our test. The story is a bit different when we moved to the outdoors though. In Left 4 Dead 2, higher clockspeed matters more than the extra two cores on the Phenom II X6 1055T.

Resident Evil 5

Resident Evil 5 is a fine example of a modern game that truly benefits from the amount of available threads. The benchmark is run in both DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 modes (1024×768), while graphics settings are set to “Low”.

Again, there is almost no performance difference between all processors in our test. This is likely to have been caused by graphics card bottleneck.

3DMark Vantage

3DMark Vantage is a popular synthetic game benchmarking software from Futuremark corp. We use the “Entry” preset to test processors and motherboards. Results are presented in three categories: the CPU score, GPU score, and E-Score which is the combined results between CPU and GPU scores. Greater figures represent better results.

We can only see a noticeable difference in Vantage’s “CPU Score”, where the Phenom II X6 1055T takes the lead, thanks to its more numerous cores. Overclocking the Phenom II X4 980 BE helps improve its performance significantly, trailing close to 1055T’s.

PC Mark Vantage-HDD Suite

PCMark Vantage measures overall system performance through a suite of benchmarks. We focus the test on the “HDD Suite” to see how much the processor is affecting storage performance.
HDD Suite itself uses a couple of real world scenarios to benchmark the storage transfer speed. The final results are presented in points. Higher points mean better performance.

There isn’t any significant performance difference between all three processors in this benchmark either. However, the Phenom II X4 980 BE does outperform the X4 975 BE and the X6 1055T by a few points.

Power Consumption

In default setting, the Phenom II X4 980 BE consumes only a few watts more compared to the X4 975. Interestingly, when overclocked to the same speed, its power consumption is actually lower than that of the X4 975 BE.