Although the release of the AMD Phenom processor series took place back in November of last year, roughly four months ago now, the highly touted quad-core processor has received limited action so far in the computer world and a lot of negative press coverage for reasons we have documented well enough during all this time.

In our hands-on experience with the first wave of Phenoms, we didn't think the situation was as dire as many made it out to be. But regardless, it was a combination of a poor product launch with corporate financial trouble that raised the company to the spotlight.

In terms of performance, AMD has stated that the new B3 processors will be no faster than the original Phenom X4 CPUs without the TLB erratum fix enabled on a clock-for-clock basis. Therefore the Phenom X4 9600 and the new Phenom X4 9650, for example, should be no different in terms of performance. Just as well that should mean that today’s flagship Phenom, the X4 9850, should sit somewhere between the Phenom 9700 and 9900 processors that we reviewed earlier this year.

It will be interesting to see how the 9850 stacks up against the rest of the Phenom family and of course, Intel's Q6600.

Read the complete review.