Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition Review
Welcome to PCWizKid’s Tech Talk. Today, we are looking at the new AMD Phenom II the X2 555 Black Edition. So this one here—here’s the part number for you, it has a 45nanometer architecture with 758 million transistors approximately. It comes at 80 Watts so it is a fairly low powered CPU. Maximum temperature that it supports 70 degrees Celsius so we want to stay below that from 0.875 to 1.40V is the core temperature there. Level 2 cache 1 meg, Level 3 cache 6 megs so not bad at all as expected on the Phenom II and it’s using the AM3 socket. So again, you could use this with an older AM2 plus. Just check your motherboard manufacture.
Now, this is my test system that I’m using today. It’s an AM3 motherboard and all of these components basically I reviewed in previous video review so you can check them out. Now in Windows 7 here at the default you can see that I’m running CPU-Z and it’s got the Callisto Core that’s a code name, 1.4 volts that’s what’s running at and I have not overclocked or done anything to it yet. You can see that this is using the revision C3, so that’s the latest revision of that CPU and here are the core speeds to multiply the Bus Speed as I mentioned nothing is over clocked, 3.2 GHz is the default for the CPU which kind of makes it the fastest clocked Dual Core CPU right now on the market. At no load, we’re looking at very low temperatures with the CPU cooler that I have which is a mainstream CPU cooler, 25 degrees Celsius is very low and at full load, we’re looking at roughly 40 degrees Celsius. Again, that’s using the GlacialTech Igloo CPU cooler for I had an even better CPU cooler or water cooling then you can probably imagine the results.
Now let’s take a look here more in detailed those on Benchmarks. Starting with 3DMark06 you can see the CPU score here which is what we’re looking at. We’re not really benchmarking the video card even though it’s a 4870 but we’re really looking at the CPU score. Okay, so 5554 here in 3D Vantage. Now where does that put the CPU? Well, with 5554 it ranks quite low compared to this other CPUs but as soon as I overclocked it and unlock the two remaining cores to make this a Quad Core, it blows all of the CPUs away. So basically, the potential for overclocking is really great with this black edition CPU and that’s one of the points I want to make in this review.
Again, with PCMark Vantage as you can see here, these are the scores added at default 3.2 and then overclocked. Now, here’s another example. If I do a conversion and coding from AVI to MP4 using default clock speeds, okay I’m not overclocking anything yet. So it’s about a 250 meg file. It takes roughly about 15 seconds to convert it from AVI to an MP4 file for you to uploading for example in HD. So 15 seconds there. If I overclocked it and unlocked the four cores then it takes nine seconds. So the potential here is really great. You can basically get yourself a Quad Core or even just over clock the two cores from it.
Her are some gaming benchmarks just for your reference. Again, we’re not testing the video card here. We’re just trying to see if the CPU can keep up with the video card obviously and then running everything at ultra high settings of course, direct text 10.1 enabled here and here’s BIOSHOCK for example and I’m getting terrific results. There’s no bottlenecking on these resolutions which is what you would expect. You don’t want a CPU to slow down the performance of your machine in the disc in the video card that you might have. So these are really, really good results from this Phenom II, obviously at default settings and not overclocking. Now if I do overclock and of course it depends on your BIOS and the chip, not everybody can overclock the same. Here is my BIOS that I’m using today on this Jetway HA08 motherboard which I reviewed previously. I enabled the advanced clock calibration. I set that to auto and that’s how it actually unlocks the four cores.
Hear are the voltages that I used for your reference and again not all BIOS’ are the same so you might not have the option. This is the BIOS that I’m using. These are the results that I get from this BIOS using the Jetway Motherboard. So by unlocking the four cores now, I got myself essentially a Deneb Core, Quad Core CPU which CPU-Z is obviously recognizing here as you can see. Well 3.6 GHz is what I’m getting out of this right now with a minimum voltage increase. I don’t want to increase this to 1.5 volts. I want to keep it as low as possible. So 1.43 volts running on full load, excellent results and as you can see basically I got myself a Quad Core for the price of a Dual Core.
So you can’t go wrong with that. If I have water cooling even better right because they only can even push this even further. But right now, I’m using a CPU cooler that’s really meant for a Dual Core CPU but I’ve unlocked the four cores. So the temperatures are obviously a little bit higher. We can get four cores compared to two. Here’s the temperature on two cores. Obviously on full load with two cores default everything. We’re looking about 40 degrees Celsius max on the temperature. But as soon as you unlock all four cores and you over clock it and everything well, it’s not going to run on at 40 degrees Celsius. It’s going to run much higher. So, either we’re talking about 40 degrees Celsius on full load we’re talking about close to 70 with the CPU cooler that I had.
Again, a better CPU cooler will decrease the results and on average you won’t even get to 70. You run about 55 degrees Celsius or less on average with the four cores unlocked overcooked at 3.6 GHz. So terrific results definitely recommended for the price point of $99.00, that’s the price at launch and I’d like to thank AMD for providing it and I hope you enjoy this video and thank you for watching.
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