So I got the Phenom 9550, for 195$... newegg shipped an original copy of Rainbow Six Vegas 2 for free. Haven't tried the game yet. Hopefully rush shipping worked well, as my friend was 2 days away of returning to my country (all e-shops I trust ships to USA only).

Without too much hope on gaming performance or whatever, I just gave it a try on the most important use I could give to such processor: Encoding, so here we go:

SPECS:
Asrock AM2NF3-VSTA
4GB DDR2 667
ATI 1950GT AGP

Before the intel fans start to laugh, I have to say a butterfly poped out of my pocket -because I almost didn't make it to 195$, I was almost going to buy the X3 instead- I have to say that I really needed something faster for my video encoding jobs, and I would loved to have any intel Qor whatever, but the reality is that It wouldn't be possible to me to upgrade motherboard and buy a Q6600. Forgetting about it, lets move to some benchmarks, but first let me note some AM2-legacy facts:

After poping the phenom in, bios setup showed an extra option on memory speed, DDR2-1066.
ganged/unganged option appeared there too.

On windows, Cool n quiet still doesn't work but I'm just giving this first shot before I fix that.

AGP doesn't work with latest ATI drivers. And Nvidia won't release an nforce gart driver (CPU to AGP bridge) compatible with this, so my ATI is working in PCI mode (AGP 0X instead of 8X ) with the standar PCI to PCI bridge... My score in 3Dmark06 dropped dramatically to 2500 points aprox, from 4100 that scored with my old Athlon 64 X2. Hopefully I'll get into gaming again when I upgrade to PCIexpress later on this year or in the next.

Overclocking: with zero effort and no voltage raise, I just put my bus at 250, phenom stable at almost 2.8Ghz, but superpi gave errors during calculations, so I took it back to its original stock speed, 2.2Ghz

Encoding with TMPGenc: Ok here goes the good news. This thing is FAST. but let me compare it to my old X2 system:

TMPGEnc. Encoding of 5000 frames from an Xvid avi file
(virtual dub as frameserver)
(Threads are set chosing each "CPU" using "afinity" in task manager)

Athlon X2:

1 threads...133s
2 threads...71s

Phenom X4:

1 threads...108s
2 threads...55s
3 threads...50s
4 threads...50s

Phenom X4
2 instances of TMPGEnc + 2 instances of Virtual dub:

1 threads...207s
2 threads...106s
3 threads...79s
4 threads...59s

Conclusions in short:

My old athlon X2 was blew away, strangely its installed in almost the same system, both boards are Asrock Nforce 3 based, not the same model but similar, both the Phenom and Athlon runs at 2.2Ghz, and I haven't overclocked the Phenom during tests. Ram performance is similar in both systems too. Anyway, I think it would be more fair to put my old X2 on my current Phenom system and try again... but well, lets talk about scalability on Phenom: At first I thought it sucked, but take a look at the following pic:

As you can see, 1 instance of TMPGEnc with Virtual Dub don't really makes the processor sweat. And that's the reason I did a test with 2 instances of TMPGenc, just to see if I could push the performance even further.
The result is amazing, I could encode 2 different files at the same time, and took 59 seconds, only 9 more seconds than if I were encoding 1 file at a time, The CPU use with both instances of TMPGEnc is shown in the pic below:

4 cores the way are meant to be squeezed. All I can say is that I'm quite happy, doubling the performance was nice. Hope I can sell my X2 system and buy an Intel Q later on... when nehalem push the Qs into a more affordable barrier. Q6600 is cheap enough tho...

i can put racing fuel in my saturn too!

hen again the 1950 is a good card - i think u have fun!