Using AMD Phenom 9950 in 2020

???

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 :)

Phenom ii x4 + am3 board with ddr2 ram slots.
Cheap ram + opportunity to use 4GB modules, because it's AMD

I have also Asus board and similar cpu, I have similar issue, not working Ethernet, bios doesn't keep save after PSU unplug (battery is new), but my board detect kingstone and adata ssd

Vacuumin chip vacuum sistor chip

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

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.

Compatibility issues in newer games with Core2 Quads and Phenoms?

I think it is time for an AMD FX Renaissance!

Try pentium g3260 in 2020

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

Will it run Eternal?

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.

lol I have a Phenom x4 9550 on an Asus M2A-VM HDMI with 4GB of ram and an Asus Geforce GT730 1GB.

Chiming in to say I've never had a Phenom but DO have a Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition (2009) that ran on two different boards: An Asus M4A78T-E AM3 socket with the 790GX chipset, no issues other than the IGP and my extremely high voltage out of spec 1.85v rated 2x2GB Mushkin kit that never seemed "stable" outside 2.08v at factory 1600MT/s. Had my first 30GB SATA II SSD on that platform and retired that system this year. It was my first HL2, Osu! GG2, Minecraft, Unreal 2 and Autocad machine. It was also the first GOOD build for Nintendo DS and PS2 emulation. Some CPU stutter in certain parts of games but it kicked ass. Ran everything great thanks to the SSD, significantly larger cache and low latency memory but there were issues keeping the IGP stable and I later went with a Biostar TA970 and dedicated 2GB HIS HD 6570 card, which only bartered some issues. AMD chipsets are the BANE of these older platforms. They're all passively cooled garbage. My first answer to perpetual overheating situations was to toss a water block on it. Like, for the entire water loop, water cooling JUST the chipset solves 99% of instability on these systems even if the CPU is screaming.

I've spent some time this week wondering if the Phenom II X4 is worth building again. It would only need a case and power supply but the answer is the same as my Pentium 4 build from high school. If you can find a mini-ITX board and a benchtop box to cram components, it can be used as an excellent 1080p home theater system but spending anything on this at all is a waste. I did eventually pick up a PowerColor RX 580 which I still use today and managed to be the only bench with a Phenom II + AMD 970 + RX 580 combo on CPUBenchmark. CPU is definitely the bottleneck, even when overclocked. This was my first attempt at making a VR capable system, which briefly worked with early titles before they were locked down by Oculus software changes and AVX instructions. This now requires something in the neighborhood of FX and Ryzen. Oh and low voltage Ballistix memory solved the unstable memory issues. I really wish somebody had mentioned something about that to me sooner. The kit worked so well that I picked up another 2x16GB kit for my Ryzen system. It's strange but I probably wouldn't have learned much about it if I didn't do this dance with the Phenom II. It's definitely an experience.

That cpu is sick

I still have my hp elite with the phenom 2.4 ghz

honestly i enjoy cpu reviews the most, why? Because they are so different from each other and every generation from either intel or amd have its interesting points, whether its core count, clock speed, architecture, ram speed, overclocking capabilities. With gpus its kinda straight forward and very consistent in most cases, most of the time just looking at few graphs you can calculate approximately how it will run for all games and resolutions. I know its pain to test cpus but for me its the most interesting point in these benchmarks.

You should try a Crucial SSD, I have one working on my Crosshair 590, I can't really remember but I think the WD didn't work on mine either. Also SSD's don't show up in the BIOS

Seems like this would be a great option for a Windows XP build to play games from the 00's.

I had a Phenom II x4 965 BE and it ran at 3.9Ghz for years. I gave it away, and I dunno the rest of it's story.

Hey I’ve just dug out my old Acer Aspire G7200 Predator Ranger DDR2-SDRAM 9850 Tower AMD Phenom 4 the hard drive has the blue screen so is it worth sorting this with a new hard drive on Windows 10 ? I will use it for design software and some strategy games ... what would you recommend I do to bring this old pc upto date please

Can we appreciate that a phenom1 platform has fucking sata

I feel like Nvidia intentionally gimped the performance of their AMD chipsets.

Nice that on a intel 870 (first gen i7) plays Fornite still fluently tho. (Don't get me wrong, I dislike that game)

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).

Phenom-enal... I'll show myself out 😜😅😂👉

Nvidia chipsets are garbage

The AMD Phenom II was really like next era after P3 I believe

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

this 140watts gives me hell on monthly power bill around 15$amonth

Worst cpu ever

Reflash the bios again, that could fix your bios problems

Never had a Phenom as I went from S939 to 775. I have little interest in 775 though. Probably because I used that system for so many years I have not had time to build any nostalgia it. 775 is probably better for a retro build but I am going with AM2 at the moment. Maybe AM3 at some point.

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.

Those core 2 quads were from 2006. And phenom berely got quads in 2008. 😆

My Phenom x4 9650 build lasted until the end of 2022. It's finally been retired. Admittedly i've not really used it for gaming beyond about 2013.

The Phenom II was the chip to have over this. It has SSE3.

The Nvidia chipset equipped ASUS M3N-HT Deluxe is a very high quality and very stable motherboard, however if YOU purchased this particular board USED, as with any PC parts being purchased used, you may or will run into problems thanks to the previous user NEVER telling you they were some type of elite PC gamer (which is what this mainboard is aimed at) and overclocker (which is what most forum warriors end up doing with crap CPUs because they refuse to take advantage of low power consumption at stock levels or buying a later faster CPU and this results in fried parts or the possibility for it.

I own that particular mainboard from long ago and I used an AMD Athlon 6400+ X2 to a Phenom II X4 980 and Phenom II X6 1100T, the latter being rather frustrating because I felt AMD intentionally forced a platform change instead of doing a die shrink to the Thuban architecture which would have enabled some stock Phenom II X6s clocked at 4.2Ghz and higher to at least 4.6Ghz stock and turbo reaching beyond 5Ghz.

Then again they were trying to push their Steamroller or Piledriver Octa Core CPUs which were getting smoked by the Phenom 1100T at stock speeds despite the new Octa Cores having "higher speeds" and just exposes AMD as a greedy company that seemed to sabotage their own CPUs out of fear from their fans and overclockers.

That said just beware that particular ASUS M3N-HT may have been overclocked by the previous owners and they may have been too agressive at it... if you leave it alone and just use it at stock speeds with the normal CPU stepping and Turbo mode of the X6s, that mainboard should not have given you any issues.

Back in 2008 my E8500 at stock run Crysis a lot better than this, later overclocked to 3.8

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

I have a very similar board - M4N82 Deluxe - and my own issue is that SATA doesn't work at all. I found a good solution in a PCIe SATA card, you can get those from aliexpress for a reasonable price. Do be aware, though - you need those that explicitly mention being suitable for boot drives, otherwise you may have problems.

Those old nvidia chipsets are just full of problems.

Note to self: Avoid NVIDIA chipsets.

No SSE3!?

I love phenom, even my email, forum username, use phenom as handler

Yea i have M2N with 9650 and loooads of issues too.. for example 2 dimm slots do not work so i am limited to 4gigs of ddr2

As long as it can browse the modern internet, stream modern videos, play games introduced for it's own generation (and there's plenty of them), or make it a file server, then I would be happy with it. Convert it to a media device with a GPU upgrade because the latest video codecs are usually built into the hardware. Give it different jobs. With a fresh computer, you play modern games, but as time goes along, you start relegating it to less intensive jobs. Upgrade the CPU if you can, but I personally wouldn't bother with overclocking. If you need to overclock, then you need to upgrade. It's just as simple as that. I would much rather try and keep the computer as cool as possible. Heat is the enemy of electronic components. Just like fast charging is really bad for your smartphones and devices. If you keep your electronics cool, they will last. For quite a long time. You'll have less components going bad on you. Allow them to get hot, things will begin to fail. When you upgrade, the older computer(s) will be there for others to use. Like your spouse, your kids, or even your guests.

If you can't afford the latest, you can stay a generation or two back and play modern games rather comfortably at a lower cost. Just have apply some due diligence when you're shopping around. Business computers are pretty good. Although, they stay on for long periods of time, they weren't hot rodded. They're business machines. With a few strategic upgrades, you can be playing modern games. I've usually built mine every 5-7 years, but I'm thinking about going the route I just mentioned. Certainly doing it differently than I've had been.

The Phenom II worked out quite a bit better imo.

I have this same board and CPU combo that I just set up. It worked first try for me. I’m even using SLI on it.

i had that CPU for a spam of about 2 year as main rig, exactly from 2013 to 2016...

What i can recall is that i upgraded my rig to an Fx8350 since my AM2+ mobo only had 2 slots of ram and 4gb sticks of DDR2 were pretty rare and costly. and also, i went for an AMD cpu since i had a bad experience with Pentium 4 and Celeron D cpus, so i wanted to stick in AMD's platform. Finally, i went for the Fx8350 since i went to the Phenom 9950 from a Celeron D, and the 4 core improvement over the low tier "D" was massive, and i figured that i wanted an 8 core CPU since multitasking was a huge deal for me, i didn't care that i3 6100 could score more fps in some games compared to the Fx, i wanted the raw multitasking performance, and i really enjoyed that feature.

As for the Phenom X4 9950 BE i recall it having 65 singlescore performance on cinebench R15, a number that was low by 2016 standars with intel 6th gen already released...
But on the other hand CPU escalated really well and had 245 multicore performance. So every core escalated at 100% performance when multithreaded was required, which was pretty noiceable.

All in all, i'd say that the main limiting factor for that CPU was the DDR2 platform of the AM2+ socket. But nevertheless it was a beast in multitasking scenarios for the era. We should recall that by 2008 having a 4 core CPU was an extreme solution for PCs, now in 2024 4 cores seems like too few, but all the software is prepared for them, back in the day having 4 cores in a single CPU felt almost like having 4 single core CPUs connected to a motherboard, since most soft wouldn't use more than 2 threads.

Last but not least, i wouldn't have traded my phenom if not for the ram limit, but it was good to do that, since a Phenom II x4 with 8gb (and after an upgrade probably 16gb) would have had sticked with me up until 2020 or so, preventing me from the very reasonable upgrades that 2010's decade had to offer

PD: now at 2024 i'm rocking an R7 5700x, i'm staying true to AMD, since it is the CPU brand for the average joes