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 (AMD) with 5,5,5,15 timings or DDR3-1333 with 7,7,7,20 timings (Intel). 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.
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| HotHardware's Test Systems |
| Intel and AMD - Head To Head | |
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System 1:
Core 2 Quad Q6600
(2.40GHz - Quad-Core)
Core 2 Quad Q9650
(3.0GHz - Dual-Core)
Asus P5E3 Premium
(X48 Chipset)
Intel G45PID
(G45 Express)
2x1GB Corsair DDR3-1800
CL 7-7-7-20 - DDR3-1333
GeForce 8800 GTX
On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio
WD740 "Raptor" HD
10,000 RPM SATA
Windows Vista Ultimate
DirectX Redist (June 2008) |
System 2:
AMD Phenom X4 9850
(2.5GHz)
Asus M3N-HT Deluxe
(nForce 780a SLI)
Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DDS4H
(AMD 790FX Chipset)
2x1GB Corsair PC2-8500
CL 5-5-5-15 - DDR2-1066
On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio
WD740 "Raptor" HD
10,000 RPM SATA
Windows Vista Ultimate
DirectX Redist (June 2008)
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| Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA XII |
| 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 XII suite with an AMD Phenom X4 9850 processor installed in the Gigabyte MA790GP-DS4H motherboard (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, and Memory Bandwidth). All of the scores reported below were taken with the processors running a clock speed of 2.5GHz, with 2GB of DDR2-1066 RAM installed.
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Phenom X4 9850 @ 2.5GHz
CPU Arithmetic |
Phenom X4 9850 @ 2.5GHz
Memory Bandwidth |
Phenom X4 9850 @ 2.5GHz
Memory Latency |
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Our Phenom X4 9850 processor performed as expected in the three SiSoft SANDRA benchmark modules that we ran. CPU arithmetic and multimedia performance was right on par with the reference data, and memory bandwidth peaked at over 9.5GB/s.
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