14 DAY TRIAL // AMD seems to have gone wrong again, despite the fact that it started to deliver the promised Barcelona chips, after seven months of delays. Rest assured, there is no problem with the silicon, as you would have expected. In fact, the problem occurs in Barcelona's neighborhood, the Phenom family.
Although the Phenom X4 9850 running at 2.5 GHz packs quite a punch, it seems that its early adopters might have a problem in convincing it to work with the existing motherboards based on the company's 770 and 780G high-end chipsets.
This is quite odd, given the fact that the Phenom X4 9850 is a high-end chip and the 780G chipset is one of the toughest chipsets on the market. On the contrary, users would expect to have a top-notch system, built from scratch with AMD hardware. The bad news is that they would end up with a rig that refuses to boot.
The Phenom 9850 Black Edition has limited support on the boards equipped with the 780G chipset because of its increased thermal design power (125 watts). The MOSFET semiconductors on the motherboard can handle the Black Edition CPU when it is properly cooled and placed in a decent case, but as most of the users omit this aspect, the board's VRM would ultimately fail and even crash.
According to tech website Fudzilla, the issue is caused by AMD's flexible guidelines released to its manufacturing partners, that allow them to use cheaper components for the VRM modules, so it's likely that they won't support the whole 125 watts of a stock-frequency Phenom 9850 Black Edition processor.
Moreover, the processor is not compatible with some of Nvidia-based motherboards, as they sport the same three- or four-phase VRM design. Apart from the Phenom 9850 Black Edition, users will get a lot of hassle when using other high-TDP offerings from AMD, such as X2 6000+/6400+, FX-62, Phenom X4 9750 ? 9850 ? 9950 and the upcoming models with higher clock speeds.