 |
 |
 |
||
|
|
||||
 |
|
|
| A Closer Look At the Processors |
As we've mentioned, AMD's Athlon II X2 250 processor is comprised of roughly 234 million transistors and is built using Global Foundries' advanced 45nm fabrication process...
Although AMD already has similarly clocked Athlon X2 processors in their line-up, the current crop of chips use more power and are built using a 65nm process, which makes them more expensive to produce. The Athlon II X2 250's native dual-core design and 45nm manufacturing process, coupled with the processor's support for PowerNow 3, will make it cheaper to produce and should make it more power friendly.
|
| Affordable Motherboards to Match |
There is no doubt, AMD's current processor line-up is priced with affordability in mind. And motherboards based on AMD chipsets have gotten more and more affordable as well, as the chipsets have gotten more mature.
As we were working with these new processors from AMD, Gigabyte sent along a pair of new socket AM3 motherboards designed to support all of the new chips. And as AMD has done with the processors, these new motherboards are affordably priced too, relatively speaking of course...
As its name suggest, the Gigabyte GA-MA770T-UD3P is based on the mainstream AMD 770 chipset. It sports an SB710 southbridge, AM3 socket, with official support for DDR3 memory speeds in excess of 1666MHz. The UD3 in the product name denotes that the board is part of Gigabyte's family of Ultra Durable 3 family of products, and as such, it sports solid Japanese capacitors, ferrite core chokes, and 2oz copper layers in the PCB to aid with power efficiency and cooling.
Gigabyte's GA-MA790FXT-UD5P is a much higher-end board, and it commands a much higher price. At about $179 though, this high-end, enthusiast-friendly socket AM3 motherboard is still significantly cheaper than many similarly targeted Intel-based mobos. The GA-MA790FXT-UD5P is built around the 790FX chipset, and supports all of the features mentioned with the GA-MA770T-UD3P, and then some. In addition to all of the features supported by the GA-MA770T-UD3P, the GA-MA790FXT-UD5P adds dual-Gigabit LAN and CrossFire support.
|
| Our Test Systems and SANDRA | |||||||||||||||||||
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.
To prevent the page from getting too cluttered with SANDRA charts, we've run these tests only on AMD's "new" processors being released today, the dual-core Athlon II X2 and Phenom II X2. The other Phenom II X3 and X4 processors hitting the scene are simply clocked differently than previous offerings. |
| PCMark Vantage | ||||
Next we ran a number of processor and platforms, including all five of AMD's new desktop offerings, through Futuremark’s latest system performance metric built especially for Windows Vista, PCMark Vantage. PCMark Vantage runs through a host of different usage scenarios to simulate different types of workloads including High Definition TV and movie playback and manipulation, gaming, image editing and manipulation, music compression, communications, and productivity. Most of the tests are multi-threaded as well, so the tests can exploit the additional resources offered by a quad-core CPU.
All of the new AMD Phenom II and Athlon II processor performed as expected in PC Mark Vantage, with one exception. For an unknown reason, the dual-core processors would fail during the Windows Media Encoder portion of the TV and Movies test. We informed AMD of the issue, but have yet to get a response. The Athlon II X2 250 performed about on-par with the Core 2 E6850--winning some tests and losing some others--whereas the Phenom II X2 550 outpaced Intel's 3.0GHz dual-core CPU across the board. |
| LAME MT and Kribibench | ||||||||
In our custom LAME MT MP3 encoding test, we convert a large WAV file to the MP3 format, which is a popular scenario that many end users work with on a day-to-day basis to provide portability and storage of their digital audio content. LAME is an open-source mid to high bit-rate and VBR (variable bit rate) MP3 audio encoder that is used widely around the world in a multitude of third party applications.
In this test, we created our own 223MB WAV file (a hallucinogenically-induced Grateful Dead jam) and converted it to the MP3 format using the multi-thread capable LAME MT application in single and multi-thread modes. Processing times are recorded below, listed in seconds. Once again, shorter times equate to better performance.
LAME MT supports only one or two threads, hence the highest clocked Core 2 here, the E6850, takes the lead in both the single and multi-threaded tests. The Phenom II X2 550 BE come in a close second, tying the Q9400, followed by the rest of the pack, in order of clock speed.
For this next batch of tests, we ran Kribibench v1.1, a 3D rendering benchmark produced by the folks at Adept Development. Kribibench is an SSE aware software renderer in which a 3D model is rendered and animated by the host CPU and the average frame rate is reported. We used two of the included models with this benchmark: a "Sponge Explode" model consisting of over 19.2 million polygons and the test suite's "Ultra" model that is comprised of over 16 billion polys.
Intel's dual-core Core 2 E6850 finishes in front of the other dual-core processors in the Kribibench 3D rendering test, and the quad core Q9400 dominates the rest of the field. |
| Cinebench R10 and 3DMark06 | ||||||||
Cinebench R10 is an OpenGL 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation tool suite used by 3D animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of system processor resources and is an excellent gauge of pure computational throughput.
This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders a single 3D scene and tracks the length of the entire process. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below.
The Intel Core 2 processors dominated in both the single and multi-threaded version of the Cinebench benchmark. Even at 2.66GHz, the Core 2 Q9400 is able to outperform the 3.1GHz Phenom II X2 550 BE.
3DMark06's built-in CPU test is a multi-threaded DirectX gaming metric that's useful for comparing relative performance between similarly equipped systems. This test consists of two different 3D scenes that are processed with a software renderer that is dependent on the host CPU's performance. Calculations that are normally reserved for your 3D accelerator are instead sent to the CPU for processing and rendering. The frame-rate generated in each test is used to determine the final score.
Neither of AMD's new dual-core processors could quite keep pace with the similarly clocked E6850 in 3DMark06, and the Q9400 once again pull ahead of the rest of the pack. We've included the Intel scores as a frame of reference only, however. Remember, these particular chips are more expensive than AMD's offerings. |
| Low-Res Gaming: Crysis and FEAR | ||||
For our next set of tests, we moved on to some in-game benchmarking with Crysis and F.E.A.R. When testing processors with Crysis or F.E.A.R., we drop the resolution to 800x600, and reduce all of the in-game graphical options to their minimum values to isolate CPU and memory performance as much as possible. However, the in-game effects, which control the level of detail for the games' physics engines and particle systems, are left at their maximum values, since these actually do place some load on the CPU rather than GPU.
The AMD-built processors put up a strong performance in the F.E.A.R. benchmark, and performed well in Crysis. The Phenom II X2 550 actually pulled ahead of the Core 2 E6850 here. |
| Power Consumption | ||||
We'd like to cover a few final data points before bringing this article to a close. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power our test systems consumed using a power meter. Our goal was to give you all an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling and while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the processors alone.
All of AMD's new mainstream processors proved to be quite power friendly. The Athlon II X2 in particular consumed relatively little power while idling and under load. The rest of AMD's line-up performed well here too, coming in with the lowest idle and load power draw versus similarly clocked Intel processors. |
| Our Summary and Conclusion | ||||||
Performance Summary: AMD's new processors performed well in all of our tests. The new Athlon II X2 250 looks to be a solid performer for a dual-core chip, especially considering its relatively low price point. It's hard to believe that almost three years go to the week, the Athlon 64 FX-62 launched at 2.8GHz, for almost $1000 and the $87 Athlon II X2 250 is a more powerful chip.
These new additions to AMD's desktop processor line-up featured here will be available immediately. Their specific part numbers and the expected price breakdown is as follows:
From a power user's perspective, these new processors may not elicit much excitement. But budget conscious consumers, overclockers, and silent or HTCP aficionados should take notice. The energy efficient Phenom II X3 705e and X4 905e are well suited to many low power or low noise applications, as is the Athlon II X2 250 for that matter. Though you'll pay a premium for the energy efficiency ratings with the Phenom IIs, the Athlon II X2 250 and Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition represent excellent values overall. Couple an Athlon II X2 250 with a decent 790GX based motherboard and 4GB of DDR2 RAM, for exmaple, and you've the basis of a relatively high performing entry-level system for about $230. That's a minimal amount of coin for a decent amount of performance.
|
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
Save for the unique markings on the CPU's heat spreader, the Athlon II X2 250 looks just like another socket AM3 AMD processor. It uses the same packaging and heat spreader design, and obviously has the same pin configuration. The Athlon II X2 250 hums along at a cool 3.0GHz (15x200MHz) and features a full 1MB of L2 cache per core (Phenom II's feature 512K of L2 per core), 64K of L1 and instruction and data cache per core (256K total), and it supports both DDR2 and DDR3 memory types.
;)
Touted as AMD's fastest dual-core processor to-date, the Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition is the other new dual-core processor being introduced today. The chip sports a 3.1GHz frequency (15.5x200MHz), a similar L1 cache configuration to the Athlon II X2 250, but only 512KB of L2 cache per core. The Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition, however, is also outfitted with 6MB of shared L3 cache. And it too supports both DDR2 and DDR3 memory types.
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;){kind=link}
;){kind=link}
;){kind=link}
;){kind=link}
;){kind=link}
;){kind=link}
;){kind=link}
;){kind=link}
;){kind=link}