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AMD Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition Review

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.

Sandra is a (girl) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

  • Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
  • Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
  • Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
  • Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
  • Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

  • SMP – Multi-Processor
  • MC – Multi-Core
  • SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
  • MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
  • GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
  • NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
  • AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
  • IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

The AMD X4 980 Black Edition has a really hard time competing with the Intel Core i5 2500k, falling behind in every single section of the results, by a significant margin.

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5 comments

  1. I really dont get the Quad core releases, its just opening them up for a butchering. the 6 cores even get beaten.

    They need to massively drop the prices to slot in behind the 6 core versions of their chips or just ditch this range totally.

  2. 1055t is still their best chip for the money, ive seen it on sale for £120 recently. why would you pay £140 or £150 for this 980BE?

    Their GPU division seems much better organised imo

  3. The problem AMD face is that these chips are actually really good, but Intel are 1-2 years ahead on a design level. It just shows how good those new Core i5’s are.

  4. fair review, I bought a 1090t last month and its great, but the cores thing makes sense to me. If they can make good 6 cores, why not just ditch the 4 cores entirely? Its not like their designs dominate and Intel are taking the low end, making it sensible.

    The pricing is way off.

  5. Just what we need, another 100mhz for the same price as before. which does absolutely nothing to compete against Intel.

    Even their six cores are so far behind, so whats the point of this? Why not bring out a six core chip like the 1100T, but clock it to 4ghz (they all run at this no problem), and just be done with it all until bulldozer. Even that is very boring, but at least at 4ghz it might seem interesting.