AMD have kindly provided their flagship dual core Phenom II processor the 555 Black Edition for review. A high stock core speed, unlocked multiplier and chance of quad core functionality makes it an interesting proposition – follow the link to see how it performs!
Product on Review: AMD Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition Processor
Manufacturer: AMD
Street Price: Approx £80
AMD are a very large chip manufacturer with many years of experience producing processors and chipsets for both business and home use.
Here’s a little about the company:
Over the course of AMD’s four decades in business, silicon and software have become the steel and plastic of the worldwide digital economy. Technology companies have become global pacesetters, making technical advances at a prodigious rate — always driving the industry to deliver more and more, faster and faster.
However, “technology for technology’s sake” is not the way we do business at AMD. Our history is marked by a commitment to innovation that’s truly useful for customers — putting the real needs of people ahead of technical one-upmanship. AMD founder Jerry Sanders has always maintained that “customers should come first, at every stage of a company’s activities.”
In recent years they have been somewhat outperformed by Intel’s offerings and only pulled back some ground with their introduction of the Phenom II and Athlon II ranges.
As a result of this i have a chip from each range here to put up for review. The first chip on test is AMD’s Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition dual core – the next (an Athlon II model) will appear in the next couple of days.
Specifications
AMD Phenom II X2 555 Dual Core Processor HDZ555WFGMBOX – 3.20GHz, Socket AM3, 6MB Cache, 2000MHz (4000 MT/s) FSB, Retail, Processor with Fan
• 3.20GHz
• Socket AM3 and AM2+ (938-pin) compatibility
• 2 processing threads
• 1 MB of L2 cache (512KB per core)
• 6 MB of shared L3 cache
• 2000MHz (4000 MT/s) FSB
• Dual channel DDR2 and DDR3 memory controller
• Black Edition ‘Unlocked Multiplier’
• 45nm process
• 80w TDP
HyperTransport™ Technology HyperTransport™ Technology – up to 4000MT/s full duplex, or up to 16.0GB/s I/O Bandwidth
Type of Memory Supported – Support for unregistered DIMMs up to PC2 8500(DDR2-1066MHz) and PC3 10600 (DDR3-1333MHz)
The chip
With a default core clock of 3.2ghz this is the fastest dual core Phenom II that AMD offer.
On top of this the Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition uses AMD’s ‘Callisto’ core. Which is essentially a quad core ‘Deneb’ with two cores disabled.
The 555 Black Edition.
As with all of AMD’s recent AM3 chips the Phenom II X2 555 BE works with both AM3 and AM2+ motherboards due to its identical socket layout and inbuilt DDR2 and DDR3 memory controllers.
The chip supports full hardware virtualization allowing virtual machine environments to be run that function with the relevant hardware.
The AM3 socket with 938 pins.
The chips C3 revision adds hardware C1E states. This means the Phenom II X2 555 BE can disable cores to save power when idling.
Looks like a fully featured chip. It’ll be interesting to see how it performs.
Overclocking and testing
Test setup
Motherboard: Asus M4A89GTD PRO/USB3
RAM: 4gb Corsair Dominator GT PC3-12800 C7 DDR3
HDD: 250gb WD 7200rpm SATA HDD
Optical drive: LG Bluray/HDDVD Multidrive
CPU cooler: Coolermaster Hyper TX3
PSU: Hiper Type-R 580w
Overclocking
The Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition clocked very nicely. The Asus M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 used to clock the Phenom II did a great job.
The ASUS motherboard has its own ‘Turbo Key II’ overclocking switch. This allows the board to choose its best stable clock. This first attempt took the Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition to a stable clock of 3.712ghz @ stock voltage.
As that proved stable some manual clocking was needed.
I upped the motherboard’s FSB to 250mhz (with the Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition’s 16x multiplier should return a clock speed of 4ghz), set the voltage to 1.45v and once again found the clock stable.
Next i used the motherboards other ‘special’ feature. It’s ‘Core Unlocker’ switch – used in tandem with the Turbo Key II the Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition unlocked to a full quad core and clocked up to 3.456ghz automatically @ 1.4v.
I tried to run the Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition in ‘quad core’ configuration at 4ghz and with 1.45v but the core unlocker throttled the set up down to 3 cores. That was still a 4ghz tri core though – nice little chip this! I’m sure with more voltage a 4ghz quad could be possible.
Temperatures
I monitored temperatures whilst running the overclocks and discovered that the 555 Black Edition ran nice and cool even when heavily clocked.
Temeperatures look good.
Testing
A selection of desktop based hardware tests from Everest’s Ultimate (Trial Edition), Futuremark’s PCMark05, WinRAR, 3DMark Vantage and a couple of recent gaming titles.
The following pages will show the results of this testing.
Everest performance
Everest is first up. It’s a PC benchmarking and monitoring utility used by many PC owners to test and assess their PC’s capabilities.
Phenom II 555 @ stock.
Phenom II 555 @ 3.712ghz.
Phenom II 555 @ 4ghz.
Phenom II 555 unlcoked to quad-core @ 3.456ghz.
Phenom II 555 unlocked to tri-core @ 4ghz.
Phenom II 720 @ 3.4ghz.
i5 750 @ 3.2ghz.
The Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition definitely compares well to the overclocked Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition here but it’s numbers aren’t quite as impressive as the Intel i5 750 @ 3.2ghz.
PCMark and WinRAR
PCMark05 is a desktop performance benchmark program from Futuremark. It allows users to assess the ability of their PC to perform standard desktop based windows tasks.
PCMark05 from Futuremark.
Here it returns a similar story although the Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition as a quad @ 3.456ghz manages to trade blows with the i5 750 @ 3.2ghz. An impressive performance.
WinRAR is a program that compresses files so they take up less space. The number crunching ability of a CPU generally translates into the speed of the compression process.
WinRAR compression utility.
The Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition loved WinRAR and things only improved as the clockspeed increased.
Gaming performance
We now move on to graphical performance – first up we take a look at 3DMark Vantage.
This is another benchmarking program from Futuremark but this time looks exclusively at the gaming performance of the PC it’s assessing.
Futuremark’s 3DMark Vantage.
The Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition does very well here. Even in dual core form the numbers compare very well even against the fellow Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition and Intel’s i5 750.
Blacksite came next. A fairly modern title it still manages to push most modern hardware – especially when the action becomes frantic!
Blacksite.
Overall performance was very good and certainly directly comparable to both the i5 and i7 setup’s i’ve tested recently.
The last test involved Race Driver GRID. Another modern title. Steady and reliable framerates are key here to guarantee a smooth gaming experience.
Race Driver GRID.
Again performance was very nearly the same.
In each case all clocks at all resolutions were perfectly playable and incredibly smooth.
Conclusion
AMD have a great performing chip in the Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition. Yes as a dual core it is on the pricey side however when you consider that the majority of these unlock to at least a tri core and clock a treat there’s a lot of extra ‘free’ performance on offer.
As long as your motherboard offers an unlocking capability and has clocking credentials the ingredients for a high speed quad core are all there.
Gaming and general desktop performance is quite comparable to the competition from Intel too which is nice.
The excellent AMD Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition.
All in all i feel that AMD are back on target with this range of chips. Budget and even high end users should take note.
Pros
+ Superb overclocking performance
+ Smooth windows and gaming performance
+ Cool running
+ Reasonably price considering potential performance increase (see next point down *)
+ * Core unlock potentially offers a fully unlocked and high clocked quad core processor
+ Great backwards compatibility with DDR2 and DDR3 memory controller
Cons
– Not quite as friendly/easy to clock as an Intel… however, i\’m really splitting hairs here!!!
– Lots of competition out there including the new Intel i3 dual cores.
The Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition offers great performance out of the box which only grows further as cores are unlocked and clock speeds increased. As such i award it our top award the Vortez Hardware \’Gold medal\’.
We would like to thank AMD for providing us with the Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition. Discuss this review on our forums
