i love phenoms. i don't know why, i just like them so so much

I have a Phenom II x4 955 still in service. OS is LinuxMint 19.3.

Hey, everyone, Phil's back!

Love watching quality Aussie content. Thanks for all your work.

I love this channel!!! one of my favorites in all youtube.

Have one of these, I agree pretty much with everything said. They haven't aged well, and the IPC simply isn't there. However as a daily driver it will do just fine. I recently built a retro 2005 PC with an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ and a Radeon X1800 XT, and it does HD video streaming, Facebook, messenger and any and all modern daily non-gaming tasks. Not that I'd recommend either, obviously, but even my dual core Athlon doesn't hit anywhere near 100% CPU load during HD streaming, downloading AND FB Messenger chatting simultaneously.

At the time of this CPU's release, I think I went with the Core 2 Duo, and being a broke student, I didn't have time to even look at the AMD equivalents of the time. Looking back now, I have a Phenom II build in part because I wanted a platform that was reasonably modern, but still had a chipset that could feature a native IDE port for working with those drives. From what I could see, some of the arbitrary CPU instruction requirements seems more for the purpose of some kind of hardware level DRM enforcement more than it is that the game or program *needs* to run it there.

Wow, glad to see the first Phenom gen here, my first PC build was a 9650 back in the day, still running at 2.7 8gb ram & a gt 1030 for older games & some newer that don't require those new instructions. Great video, keep the good work :)

Wow. That puppy aged surprisingly well! I had the 9750 on my first build back in the day. Loved it. So many hours of Gmod and TS3 dumped into that thing.

I had one of these in 2008. Was a decent chip and with the South African currency not being so bad back then it was decently priced.

never had a Phenom.....just the Phenom 2.....i heard weird stories about the original Phenom so i skipped it...anyway great video Phil..thanks for covering the original Phenom

I literally built this system 2 weeks ago, ran into all kinds of problems too. And actually switched to a Intel platform, 775 socket. I just wanted a windows 7 machine.

Love the Friday because Phil is uploaded new video

I had a Phenom configuration until i saw your review of x79 platforms and made myself a pretty solid gaming PC. It served me verily for 12 years! So thanks a lot! I was even able to play Witcher 3 on my old faithful Phenom!

Reflashing BIOSes is a great idea to protect against bitrot. Can you make a video on installing OSes on SATA drives through IDE converters? Not how, but the results.

My desktop is still using an AM3+ Phenom II x4 965 3.4ghz. Still works great, but when I update to an AM5 socket Ryzen in the far future, I'll keep it for a retro-gaming PC build. :)

Those nforce 680i and 580 will die without active cooling like a chipset fan. I have a lot of dead SLi motherboards with dead chipsets or memory channels because of this.

Nice video Phil. Looking forwards to the next one!!

Another great video Phil, thanks a lot. My progression as cpus go was 486 sx 33, 486 dx 50, Pentium III, athlon xp, athlon 64, then I went to a mobile core i7 first gen, back to desktop i7 2600k, back to mobile intel crap, and now I'm very happy to rock a R7 1800x since 2018 and for many more years.

Great video... you should consider doing a video with a MiSTer running the ao486 core with an MT-32... that sounds right up your alley and would make for a very entertaining video, cheers

If it werent for the instructions set these cpu's could be and still are a'lot of fun to mess with sadly games nowadays demand newer cpu with that said i still think these are great for old AAA titles Have great a day sir :)

Great video as Usual, Phil! Thank you man, you're making my quarantine easier. Thinking at loud, did you ever consider to include some performance analysis in video rendering? I remember myself a couple of decades ago dreaming about building a fast P4 to encode some movies to DivX... I think it would be a nice retro review haha

Wow, that must be the most colorful mono I've seen in a long time.

I have a Phenom-based pc in my closet that I used for close to a decade. it served me well.

Phil, when I saw the title for this video I remembered the i7-920. It was a legendary CPU back in the day and it has 4C8T, which is not totally obsolete right now. I would love it if you could look at the i7-920 one day, especially with a moderate overclock to 3.4 or 3.6 GHz.

Very cool. Kinda the forerunner to my Ryzen 3 1300x.

Nice video, as always. I had a phenom 9850 in november 2008 with the ASUS M3A32 MVP, although the SB600 on it is SATA-2 it works with SATA-3 HDD and SSD without issues. Upgraded to a Phenom II 940 six months later, cooler and faster. It still works, but not as a gaming PC. Edit: I remember having issues with a 9800GTX after making changes in the BIOS, after rebooting it didn't POST (the GPU fan kept spinning fast), I had to switch off the PSU because the reset button didn't work, only happened with that GPU.

Imagine running a game in 2010 using a processor from 1998!!

Interesting video Phil, thanks for taking the time even if you can't recommend the CPU.

I have an OG phenom media center PC that my grandfather bought to use as a DVR when it was brand new. It still runs as a plex server :)

One of my Uncles is still using his X4 since he built it in 2009. I cleaned it a couple times throughout the years for him & recently added an SSD to it for him which helped a lot. But for him since he does not play any Modern Games it is ok for him for now but not much longer because his motherboard also only supports 4 Gigs of RAM. I have been trying to talk him into building a Ryzen System, even the first or second generation Ryzen would be fine for him.

I like the video, keep it 💯 up. The thermal pad solution is a great idea. The last time I used this solution was with, wait for it. 486DX/66 Cpu's from Intel & cyrix a long time ago.

I knew this wasn't going to be pretty. The Phenom series wasn't worth buying until the Phenom II showed up. But they haven't aged well for gaming, either, because they predate the latest instruction sets as well. If you want to game, the FX series is still good enough because they have all the instructions and plenty of cores, but not anything from the Phenom era.

i have used that cpu for many year and now i use phenom II x6 1055t but the 9950 have a special place on my heart

I had built a Phenom x3 8450e system back in the late 00s. Ran it for the longest time before upgrading to a FX-6300, now on a properly modern Ryzen 3600. Back in 2008 people weren't as concerned about getting 60FPS in games as they are today.

I've built a few phenom systems lately, good for classic gaming and general use.

Like before view, that's the faith I have in your videos

I had this one back in the day! Before upgrading to the X965 which I still got in a holiday home in my second PC!

I had the same board I was able to pick up a MSI board and all was good. I do have a new in box FX 9590 I need to do something with later since the last one cooked after a year Great job

I still have a 9850 Black Edition that can overclock to 3.1Ghz which did very well for a while but oh my God that power consumption!

I'm done watching the video, and I compared it to my C2Q Q9500. It runs circles around that processor. I bought a Dell Optiplex 780 and that processor, for just under $60. They're everywhere, and dirt cheap! So, you're right. This is just for collector's item, or if someone have sentimental value on this.

i had one of those, gave it away and still works almost every day. i upgraded to a ryzen 1700 in 2018

I still have some love for the 2nd gens. My build back then was a Phenom II 955be , had a gtx 480 and I used a HAF9(something)5 full tower, 850w Corsair PSU, and my first USB SSD(that is still in use for the PC I am using now amazingly, outlasting 4 platter drives). I am surprised the 9950 even held up that good. There was quite a difference between Phenom and Phenom II.

Hey Phil those Asus board were always like that. A big headache for me. The NF chip is fairly good, and performance seemed low to me that it should have been. Alway good to have available a strip array to get beyond that single drive performance. Usually what I did was install on the secondary chip. And find the nforceware, and gart drivers as the chips set won't install any options and is not "default" compatible. THE BAD NEWS.. Hence it appears you've tested with a disabled system. No chipset running/drivers. All your " not working and problems" seem to be all that it is. Nforce software you cannot get from Nvidia website any more but you should be able to track one down. If you can find a later version that 1.1 it can and sometimes is a good or bad experience. As some things worked better and some worse depending on what you had.

I am always amazed at how good Linux is for old hardware and new hardware alike.

Had one of these briefly back in the day ended up swapping it out for a b97 found in a pre-built office machine. Better performance and less power. Be awesome if you covered the b97 as its kind of elusive to find

I had to check but I had that exact same 125W CPU, the exact same motherboard, and the exact same RAM. Definitely had a different GPU though, I first had a GTX 260 then I got a GT 740 that I got at a pawn shop for $5. Sadly my motherboard died to unknown causes about a year ago but it worked great for a really long time. If boards weren't so pricy I would probably rebuild it as a WinXP machine or something along those lines.

Phenoms were great bang for the buck. I built a hexacore Phenom II 1100T system that was a great media centre and passively cooled.

Before watching this video i quickly checked this cpu at passmark charts and after watching this episode i was very impressed how well it ran new tomb raider games, interesting cpu, too bad your motherboard was crapping itself :D

Last year my daily driver broke down and for few days I had to use an old workstation - unclocked Phenom II x2 555, 6 GB RAM, SSD and integrated HD3000. Windows worked very sluggishly on this, but after installing minimal Debian 9.9 with LXDE from scratch I was very positively surprised. Working with ~10 pages running in the Firefox (incl. 2x YT 720p) and Sublime Text 3 simultaneously was comfortable and fluent, on some "ancient" properitary driver even the desktop worked in FHD without issues.

I have a Phenom 9550 until this year. When the motherboard broke. But i still have the processor. I like it

Cool phenom experience 😁😁😁😁😁

I might buy a phenom CPU soon. That would be a huge upgrade from a 2 cores Athlon 5200+.

That peak power usage just cooled me doooooooooown...

I had a phenom 9820 for a long time, it really wasn't a great cpu. It chugged on game then, and didn't oc at all. The phenom II X4 940 I replaced it with was a big performance bump, and oc like a dream. Plus quite a few including mine you could unlock the additional 1-2 cores with the right chip and board.

If I recall correctly, there was a pretty bad Branch Prediction Unit in the Phenom I series of CPUs causing performance to suffer greatly when patched via firmware. It is my understanding that this bug was fixed in the Phenom II series of CPUs which allowed them to perform much better than the previous generation. I'd be curious to see you comparing the two to see if there's any performance differences between the two platforms.

I remember having one of these with a 3870x2 . Still have it in my part cupboard

I've been using AMD processors since 1991 when I built an AMD 386 40 MHz PC. I had built a Phenom 9850 in 2008, which was okay at the time. As soon as Phenom II came out, the board and CPU went into my mother's PC, and she's still using it today. I stuck with the Phenom II X4 945 and X6 1090 until I could build an FX8150, which was slightly disappointing, and didn't get much better when I built an FX8350. I held on to the 8350 until this year, when I finally built an Ryzen 7 2700x.

I waited and got the Phenom 2 965 BE. I had come from a Core Duo. I will say the 965 BE performed great and was my main rig for 7 years or so. I made a big mistake and got a fairly cheap i5 6400 in 2015 and switched back to the 965 BE (overclocked the snot out of it) as the i5 6400 felt slow and stodgy. Got a Ryzen 1600 a year and a half later and retired the 965 BE to a kids computer where it still does a competent job. Definitely got my money's worth. I have owned 30 or so computers of Intel and AMD make over my many years but I have never been so unimpressed with a chip as I was with the i5 6400. Over all Intel and AMD have been good to me but dang that i5!

Now I had an Athlon gaming system up until 2016 I upgraded it as far as I could on my stock motherboard and it was awful. But I loved it so much at the time I didn't know the difference. Though now if I built a system like this the likelihood of me having matching parts is extremely high and could get some nostalgia from it.

I am curious if you could use a PCI based ssd, with an adapter to go to a regular desktop size socket on such an old system.

Phil I’ve used a few of these chipsets and I feel like the best way to fix them is to toss them straight into the bin and replace them with something else. I’m not one to give up easily but obviously someone cut some corners somewhere on these.

Hi Phil, interesting cpu and makes me wonder why amd chose the names that they did because I bought a phenom 2 955 black edition in 2009. Going from 9950 to 955 is odd to me. Anyway thanks for the review. I really loved these CPUs back in the day, competing vs Intel before the fx series happened.

Very interesting

Hey Phil, thanks for videos. Makes me want to fire up the old Phenom II B55. Where did you get your test bench? I'm struggling to find a decent one.

Not exactly the same cpu's, but i've had great luck unlocking cores with the phenom ii series. It's a nice bump to sometimes get a quad from a dual core.

I used to have the socket 775 version of this motherboard and it used to give me problems.

Owned the Phenom 9600 back in the day. I made it my routine daily to disable the TLB patch that reduced performance. Never once did I run into the bug that would cause the CPU to crash with the patch off. I admit during the time it may have been wiser to have a faster dual-core than a quad-core, but overall I never had an issue running any games up until 2012. Overall though it was the most eye opening experience I ever had going from a Low-End even when it was built Socket A Sempron 2500+ to the Phenom 9600. Even with my modern day pc no upgrade has replicated that experience.

Great video Phil! One piece of advice though: try to use a video card with a maximum of 4gb of VRAM; on LGA775 and AM2 there is a limit at the maximum video memory that the chipset (Intel; Nvidia; AMD) supports! I remember I solved the BIOS problem through trial and error and determined that the video card was the culprit!

I'm currently typing this on my retro PC in progress on the M3N-HT Deluxe. I agree, it was a pain to get up and running. I opted for a SSD boot drive via AHCI. AHCI only works on SATA ports 5 & 6 (the black pair), and the IDE/RAID/AHCI setting is buried in the BIOS. side note - at least this board would POST running an old BIOS with a newer, unsupported CPU *ahem* RYZEN

In my opinion, the best use would be an XP game machine or under Windows 10, simply a browser/word processor paired with a GT 210 or similar video card.

Family computer had a Pentium D when I was a kid, but then went straight for budget Athlon II as a teen. Processor did absolutely everything fine for years, I didn't even bother changing the thermal paste for like 5 years, at that point it was all gone haha. It was even performing "OK" when I got a GPU updgrade, especially with a 10% overcklock. It's a bit of a shame the overclocking on those chips is so complicated with North Bridge, HT Link speed etc. If it was as easy as intel - just put the multiplier up, you could've easily push that thing to 4Ghz probably...

I love my phenom ii x6. Of course on more modern games i prefer my fx 8350. But i don't know about crysis. I played it on athlon 64 x2 3800+ with a radeon hd 3850 and i remember that at 1280*1024 it run smoothly.

Damn, that board is fried Phil

From what I've seen, SATA3 SSD drives can be used with older boards that only support SATA 1 or 2. You just wouldn't get the full performance of the SSD.

As someone who was using a Phenom II x6 OC i must say, it does not hold well. The lack of instructions do make it perform terrible on modern systems.

You should try playing with the power profiles more and try using the ultimate mode to see if it even makes any difference.

I remember seeing these in magazines when they came out and they just weren't as optimized for most games and software. Atleast not compared to Intel at the time with the Core series. I had a AMD Athlon 64X2 6400+ at the time in 2008 and didn't upgrade until 2013 for the FX 8350 and 2019 for the Ryzen 2600.

I use a Phenom II 1055t x6 with an Asus M4A87TD/USB3 motherboard. I love this cpu.

i converted my pink computer running phenom 2 b96 to ryzen half year ago and made it my daily driver most fun was repackaging off the shelve power suply into an odd shaped oem case and basically reversing motherboard brackets on the case (btx-to-atx) in the end i have hraphic card installed horisontally in a desktop computer with a fan facing the pcb of the motherboard and blocking access to expansion ports, with ssd underneth and encased with l shaped power suply. hdd cage in place of old case cooling stack and cpu in place where case had a vent holes for graphics :] (not to mention custom blower fans from 3lcd projector blowing air under the graphic card and power suply) i love how quirky my phenom replacement is and that it uses the same case, graphic card and dvd drive (which is white)

i picked up a beige box pc for 20 bucks with an athlon 64 X2 4800+ (2006), using it for an xp machine playing around with my old pci-e cards. currently got a 9800gtx+ in it, waiting for an Athlon II X2 255 3.1GHz from 2009 to arrive which was 8 bucks on ebay. i hope the improvement is worth while! do you have any game recommendations from those years? thanks again for the vids :)

No afiliate link for the heatsink? These look a lot like the one included in my s939 4800x2 but with a bigger fan, can you post somewhere a picture of various AMD heatsinks... Or do a quick comparison video? BTW I really miss your 2 videos every week, hope everything is getting better for you. Thanks for so much and great content!

bios could have option to set which pci express port to use for main display, check that.

It took him two weeks to releasr a video. I think hes busy for so many reasons.. i always wait for a retro pc review 😊

I used to rock a phenom 965 black.

Seeing Just Cause 4 running on this made my jaw drop. My computer meets the min. requirements and refuses to run even with an RX 5700 XT paired with it. Crazy! As for what this can run eh there are enough in the backlog4life that could play on this and for the right price I would want this build. My brother had an AMD Phenom based system or maybe it was Phenom II. I'd like to see what gaming was like for him with what he used. Anyway to finish up like you said this is for collector's item and that fits what I want it for. Also on that note what would be the top card one would pair with the Phenom X4 9950BE at the time it was out? It would be nice to have the right video card too for it. Finally in regards to the Kingspec SSDs you have used for a year or two what is the oldest socket cpu paired with mobo do these SSDs or any SSD run with? Still haven't ever used one in a pc and wouldn't mind trying at a very cheap price.

I bought an AMD Athlon II X3 425 back in 2010, since I'd read that many of those could unlock the 4th core and cache (so effectively change it to a Phenom II CPU). It worked really well (using mainboard Asus M4A785TD-V EVO) (I think it was unlocked to "Phenom II X4 B25"), so I felt I got a lot for my money :-) A few years later I upgraded to a used Phenom II X6 1055t (I had set the computer to be used as a Plex- and file-server, running Linux and ZFS). The CPU and motherboard supported ECC memory, which is recommended for ZFS. This computer has been running 24/7 until last week, when I finally upgraded to a Ryzen-based system (Ryzen 9 3900X). The Phenom II X6 system still works flawlessly though, so I will probably find some use for it (maybe a backup server).

Hello everyone, if I want to try on 3d modeling or vfx industry like working on Blender but has limited budget, is RX 570 a good start? Thanks.

About the X16 PCIE lanes from CPU not working with recent GPUs, Buildzoid over at AHOC pointed out a few times that it's a compatibility issue, I don't think your motherboard is broken.

The heat these dumped out was something else at the time where almost everything else ran so much cooler though the rarer low watt versions were a lot easier to handle. All in all at the time I felt that AMD had the better platform as Core 2 was constrained by the FSB.

I still have and use this procesor

I had one of these for a while back in the day. It was the 140 W version, and with a proper AMD chipset like the 790FX, it performed quite decently for the price (I got it on sale for about NZ$300). I ran it at 3.0 GHz, which was the limit, since the first-gen Phenoms really weren't good overclockers. Its biggest issue was the lack of SSE3 instructions, which proved to be a problem even then, especially when it comes to emulation. This is why I replaced it with the LGA 1366 platform and a cheap Xeon E5506 ES CPU (4C/4T, 2.13 GHz) soon after, which easily clocked to 3.2 GHz and could compete favorably against the top-end Core 2 Quads like the QX9650.

I USE A PHENOM 2 X3 B75 every day and i love it

How PCI express 3.0 can be used in PCI-E 1.0 boards? Some ECS and PC Chips boards doesn't recognize some cheap cards like the Geforce GT 630, but i am seeing a Radeon RX working. Can guide some technical clues to find?

By the time this cpu came out I was already on the Core 2 Q6600. The last AMD cpu I had was an AMD 64 3700+ San Diego single core proc on a Socket 939 mainboard. I am looking to upgrade my current system back to AMD probably a Ryzen 7 3700x.

kinda interesting SSD drives with sata 3 support run on my Abit Fatal1ty FP-IN9 SLI with 680i chipset from 2007

At some point even chrome broke on non sse3 chips, the canary build was eventually fixed.

I'm still using a 2009 cpu as my daily driver, an i7-860. Still does what I need it to do so I have gotten over 11 years of use out of my ~$800 total. I feel I could get a few more years out of it if I upgrade to an ssd.

My Aunt is still using a Phenom II X4 940 with 8GB DDR3 1066 in her desktop - seems to be all she needs.

maybe you could test out DXVK wrapper with this cpu? since vulkan has much less cpu overhead it should help mostly on DX11 games.