![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Sunday , February 08, 2009
- Author:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Phenom II Gets Affordable with DDR3 & AM3
AMD comes back today with the launch of its Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition and Phenom II X4 810 processors built on the AM3 socket platform that now allows enthusiasts to take advantage of the bandwidth that DDR3 has to offer. Along with that, these CPUs come in with very sub-$200 price points.
Synthetic Tests
As usual we will start with our synthetic benchmarks. Synthetic benchmarks tend to be great tools that easily allow us to identify problems and easily tweak performance but over the years have become less and less reliable when it comes to actually mirroring real-world performance. If these are what you are make your buying decisions based on, you are will figure out sooner or later that you made a choice that did not impact your actual computing experience the way you thought it might. So take them with a grain of salt.
A note on our thinking behind our clock scaling. The top two lines show our Phenom II processors at stock clock speeds. The X3 720 at 2.6 I thought would give us a good clock to clock comparison with the stock X4 810. Keep in mind that the X3 720 is actually packing an extra 2MB of L2/L3 cache. I scaled the X4 810 to 3.2GHz in order to give us a clock for clock comparison to Intel’s QX9770 flagship processor. If all of this comparison data is not important to you, simply look at the first two lines and the bottom two lines as this is the performance you would see out of the box on those systems.
Synthetic Benchmarks
Sisoft Sandra 2009
First and foremost I wanted to look at memory bandwidth. Remember, all our systems here are equipped with 2 x 2GB of DDR3-1600 running in a dual channel configuration. Our Q8200 overclocked to 2.6GHz has a DDR3 speed of 1480MHz so it is at a disadvantage although our benchmark shows it to be doing just fine compared to the QX9770 on the same motherboard. Our Core i7 system is still posting staggering bandwidth with only its two channels.
Our Phenom II processors with DDR3 look stunning as they certainly have more bandwidth than ever before. As you can see as we scale the core clock on the X4 810 to 3.2GHz from 2.6GHz, we can a good bit of bandwidth. Keep in mind that with our particular ASUS AM3 motherboard, our memory clock is fully independent of our core bus clock. We could just leave it set at 1600MHz unlike the Intel systems.
Sisoft Sandra 2009
Keep in mind this CPU test is very sensitive to multithreaded situations, so you will see very different results for the X3 and X4 Phenom II processors at the same clock. Our Intel CPUs due retain their advantage in this synthetic benchmark.
Hiper Pi
We use Hiper Pi in its single threaded mode. So the results you see here are from a single CPU core. As we have seen in the past, Intel dominates this synthetic across the board.
wPrime
wPrime is a very much a multithreaded synthetic that will utilize all cores available, both virtual and physical. The Phenom II shares two clock per clock victories over Intel in this benchmark. The X4 810 outruns our Q8200 at the same clock speed and the X4 810 at 3.2GHz manages to squeak out a win over the Core 2 Intel QX9770 flagship. The Core i7 remains dominant over the entire field as is to be expected.