AMD 890GX SB850 Chipset Debut: Phenom II X6 Ready

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.

The new Core i5 661 just missed the mark set by the Core 2 Quad Q9400, according to 3DMark06's CPU built-in CPU benchmark, and trails the rest of the pack. Not bad considering it's got half the cores of all of the chips.

The results from 3DMark06's CPU performance module test a similar story to Cinebench. The 890GX-based boards finished slightly ahead of the older 785G, but their margins of victory were not very big.

3DMark Vantage's CPU Test 2 is a multi-threaded test designed for comparing relative game physics processing performance between systems.  This test consists of a single scene that features an air race of sorts, with a complex configuration of gates. There are aircraft in the test that trail smoke and collide with various cloth and soft-body obstacles, each other, and the ground. The smoke spreads, and reacts to the planes as they pass through it as well and all of this is calculated on the host CPU.

Surprisingly, 3DMark Vantage tells the exact opposite story of 3DMark06. Here, both 890GX-based motherboards put up the exact same score, which happened to be a bit lower than the 785G. Again though, the delta is less than a single frame per second.