The verdict

The B3 revision of Phenom finally leaves the TBL bug behind it, performance was definitely faster in many segments, and the Phenom 9850 as tested today is pretty much on par with the Intel Q6600 at many fronts, though not pre-dominantly.

Fact remains however that AMD's flagship product still needs to be sought in the mainstream market. And fair enough, AMD adopted the pricing strategy to that as the Phenom X4 9850 can be purchased at the $235 price point. And that's just not bad. Once we started overclocking the processor, we noticed that instantly we had a processor that could keep up with Intel's offering much better.

Once AMD manages to yield the processors at 3 GHz, things will definitely look even better as we then reach the enthusiast gaming audience. I think many of you have been waiting for this much needed B3 revision of Phenom. With the coming of B3 AMD finally is getting things under control and from here onwards, their processor segment can only go upwards again.

AMD CPUs as offered today will be popular as a processor for economical multi-threaded systems. My prognosis really sums it up like this, it's an excellent processor for inexpensive computers for gaming, rendering and media processing tasks.

Whether or not AMD can ramp up the clock speed this year and make sure 45nm is on time remains a question. They do benefit from the fact that Intel has fallen behind in regards to their release of 45nm processors. But with Intel's Nehalem in sight, they should worry & hurry.

For now though in the present the Phenom is a more than capable processor and resolves a very unfortunate bug with a few extra perks as well for a really great price. For gamers, HTPC builders, en generic PC users that can't spend more than 235 USD on a quad-core processor, it's actually very recommended.

And you know what ? It is likely the cheapest quad-core processor you can find on the market, that's a lot of value & with this new B3 revision, a perfectly safe & stable product.

Thanks to AMD for providing this processor.

You can pick up the AMD Phenom 9850 BE for 235 USD right here.