We’ve had the Phenom X4 9850 for a day now and we’ve clocked all four cores stably to 3.1GHz using a regular Akasa AK-876 air cooler. That’s a modest 24 per cent boost over its native 2.5GHz clock speed.

We used a Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DQ6 motherboard, 2GB Corsair TwinX 1066MHz Ram (downclocked to 800MHz but linked to the bus so it increased to 888MHz), a 0.225V core boost, a 14x CPU multiplier and a 222MHz bus speed to achieve this magic number.

That voltage boost is rather big, but our sample was also happy to sit at 2.8GHz with a simple 0.05V increase. It even booted at 3.2GHz, but couldn’t load Windows properly.

When overclocked, our preliminary results show it is 13 per cent faster than a 2.66GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6700 in PCmark05 and two per cent faster in Cinebench 9.5. It’s still slower than a 3GHz QX6850 and a long way off high end Penryn quad cores.

At its default speed (2.5GHz) the Phenom X4 9850 can’t keep up with Intel’s slowest Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor in PCmark05 CPU test, Cinebench 9.5 or X. It does beat the Q6600 by 160 points in 3Dmark06’s CPU test though.

The Phenom X4 9850’s big hope lies in a decent retail price. Pre-order pricing lies at £170 which, in the UK, is £20 more than a Core 2 Quad Q6600.

A full review will follow, but here are some more scores from our 3.1GHz overclocked sample:

3Dmark06 CPU:  4526

Cinebench 9.5: 478 (single core), 1473 (quad core)

Cinebench X: 2707 (single core), 9959 (quad core)

PCmark05: 9172 (just 7396 at 2.5GHz)

A full review will come soon, but for now these results can be directly compared to PCW's other CPU tests at www.reportlabs.com