As an AMD fanboy, I was excited to be one of the first to pick up a Phenom 9500. Paired this with an MSI K9A2 cf-f motherboard, 500W Ultra power supply, 4 gigs of corsair 800 mhz memory, an XFX 8600GT XXX, under Vista 32.
After a bois update on the mobo, the Phenom was running stable at 2.2Ghz.
Multitasking with this CPU is OUTSTANDING!!! Benchmarks came in MUCH lower than expected however. After Vista SP1 installed with the automatic TLB patch, I decided to do some research on overclocking this cpu as well as disabling the performance reducing patch. Needless to say after some Bios fsb tweaking, and disabling the TLB patch, I have this gem clocked at 2.4 GHZ, in addition to gaining an increase in performance. (About 5 more fps in games was the most noticable improvement)I get 31 FPS AVG on COH DX10 with all setting on mostly high, and 25 fps avg in Crysis on all medium settings. With a better video card this rig would smoke :-)
Considering all the hastle to bring this CPU with the TLB issue back from the dead....you'll have to be the one to decide if its worth it.
Not a bad chip at all for a rock bottom budget quad. An average PC user would be more than happy with the performance.
Once tweaked, this chip turned out to be a little gem.