AMD Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition AM3 Processor Review

Test Setup
Our test system very rarely changes, and there is reasoning behind this. The reason that our test system rarely changes is so that we can keep the continuity flowing which leads to our results being part of a fair test, especially when comparing to other components.

Our test machine comprises of:

Test System
Processor (CPU)	AMD Phenom II X2 555
Motherboard	Asus Crosshair IV Formula
Memory (RAM)	4GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 1800MHz
Graphics Card	HIS Radeon HD 6850 IceQ X Turbo
Heatsink (HSF)	CoolerMaster Hyper 212+
Primary Hard Drive	2 x Kingston V+ Series 64GB SSD (RAID 0)
Power Supply	BFG EX Series 1200 Watt Modular Power Supply
Chassis	CoolerMaster Lab Test Bench
Operating System	Windows 7 Professional Edition 64-bit

We use various different applications for testing from synthetic benchmarks to the latest gaming benchmarks and the following is a list of the software used:

• AIDA64
• Dirt 2
• Metro 2033
• 3DMark 11
• Cinebench
• HyperPi

We also use other software for measuring certain aspects of the systems performance, including SpeedFan, CPUID Hardware Monitor, CoreTemp and also Prime95 to give 100% load to the CPU so that we can measure the power consumption through a plug-in electricity monitor.

For comparison purposes, we will be comparing the CPU to other processors on the market including offerings from both AMD and Intel to see how the performance is affected from each benchmark/test.