AMD Phenom II X4 810 and X3 720 BE Processors

How We Configured Our Test Systems: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set memory timings for either DDR2-1066 with 5,5,5,15 timings or DDR3-1333 with 7,7,7,20 timings. The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows Vista Ultimate was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.

HotHardware's Test Systems  Intel and AMD - Head To Head

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2009  Synthetic Benchmarks

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA XII, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran three of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2009 suite with AMD's new Phenom II X4 810 and X4 720 processors (CPU Arithmetic, CPU Multimedia, and Memory Bandwidth).  All of the scores reported below were taken with the processors running at their default clock speeds of 2.6GHz and 2.8GHz, respectively, with 4GB of DDR2-1066 or DDR3-1333 RAM running in unganged mode.

All of the various SANDRA CPU benchmarks we ran reported scores in line with expectations.  The new Phenom II X4 810 performs behind the higher-clocked Phenoms IIs and Core 2s, and the Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition comes in a notch behind the X4 810, due to its having one less core.  The memory bandwidth tests tell a more interesting story, however.  While operating with DDR2-1066 memory, both of these new Phenoms put up peak bandwidth scores as reported by SANDRA of about 12.3 - 12.6GB/s.  Replace the DDR2 with DDR3-1333 memory though, and those bandwidth numbers hit a peak about 13.5GB/s.  That extra bandwidth should pay some dividends in the more taxing tests in out benchmark suite.