The Phenom II X4 810 & X3 720: AMD Gets DDR3 But Doesn't Need It
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 9, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Blender 2.48a
Blender is an open source 3D modeling application. Our benchmark here simply times how long it takes to render a character that comes with the application.
While AMD is competitive in many applications, some do favor Intel's architectures; Blender is one of them. Only the Phenom II 700 series is competitive thanks to its triple-core advantage.
Microsoft Excel 2007
Excel can be a very powerful mathematical tool. In this benchmark we're running a Monte Carlo simulation on a very large spreadsheet of stock pricing data.
Sony Vegas Pro 8: Blu-ray Disc Creation
Although technically a test simulating the creation of a Blu-ray disc, the majority of the time in our Sony Vegas Pro benchmark is spend encoding the 25Mbps MPEG-2 video stream and not actually creating the Blu-ray disc itself.
AMD is very competitive here, outperforming all of the equivalently priced Intel CPUs. The clock speed and cache advantage of the Phenom II X3 720 is enough to even outpace the Core 2 Quad Q8200.
Sorenson Squeeze: FLV Creation
Another video related benchmark, we're using Sorenson Squeeze to convert regular videos into Flash videos for use on websites.
The performance breakdown is more of what we've been seeing here tonight.
WinRAR - Archive Creation
Our WinRAR test simply takes 300MB of files and compresses them into a single RAR archive using the application's default settings. We're not doing anything exotic here, just looking at the impact of CPU performance on creating an archive:
The entire Phenom II lineup ends up performing very similarly, largely because there are IO limitations at work here despite our use of an SSD. Cache size matters as Intel's smaller cache quad-core chips don't do nearly as well as the 12MB behemoths.
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zagortenay - Wednesday, February 11, 2009 - link
When you click that Intel logo on the left hand side, Anandtech becomes an Intel site. Only a fool beleives Anandtech is promoting Intel for free and I beleive the cunning Intel gets what she pays for.Hey Anand this is not acceptable! Hey Anand do you hear me!
swaaye - Thursday, February 12, 2009 - link
I've always thought Anand was more of an AMD guy, going by how he names his AMD and ATI reviews. :)swaaye - Tuesday, February 10, 2009 - link
Phenom doesn't really need much bandwidth to do its thing for most applications.http://ixbtlabs.com/articles3/cpu/amd-phenom-x4-98...">http://ixbtlabs.com/articles3/cpu/amd-phenom-x4-98...
starx5 - Tuesday, February 10, 2009 - link
I can see intel logo on the 1eft of this site.You must independent from intel's hand.
I know Core i7 is totally jerk in gaming.
starx5 - Tuesday, February 10, 2009 - link
I think anandtech is intel's doll.refer to this reviews
http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/phenomii_7...">http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/phenomii_7...
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/socket-am3-phe...">http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/socket-am3-phe...
http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-phenom-ii-x4-810...">http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-phenom-ii-x4-810...
http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-phenom-ii-x4-920...">http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-phenom-ii-x4-920...
Core i7 is absolutely a gaming failer!!
goinginstyle - Friday, February 13, 2009 - link
I think it is more of a case of those sites listed being an utter failure at proper benchmarking.jchan2 - Tuesday, February 10, 2009 - link
Interesting.... I wonder whats up with that?7Enigma - Wednesday, February 11, 2009 - link
They also kind of contradict their own article later on saying:"Benchmark note:
We moved towards a new 64-bit environment for all our test. This entailed new software updates for our benchmarks plus we replaced a lot of our tests with different software. This means that if you compare the results published in this review with other processor reviews from Guru3D.com, the numbers might not add anymore up due to different software and tests."
So unless they reran an Intel system using 64-bit software I don't know where the data came from for the i7 and E8400 platforms?
7Enigma - Wednesday, February 11, 2009 - link
Possibly even more weird in the Guru3D article is the test system only had 2 gigs of ram?!? That just seems crazy even with Vista 32-bit. You can easily get some system oddness. I mean heck, 4gig should be the MINIMUM in a review of new hardware. I can't tell if that would help or hurt, but it should definitely add another layer of complexity to figuring out what means what in this article.7Enigma - Wednesday, February 11, 2009 - link
Seems like (in the OC'ers club review) they were GPU limited or at least entering the compression range in the majority of circumstances. They used a GTX 260 (216) which is definitely a bit underpowered for the latest generation of CPU's. Most of their graphics settings are too high once they get above 1024X768 to see a large difference in frame rates. Yes you can say they are still all playable, but it makes seeing the actual power of the CPU less important.Guru3d article again is weird. The biggest problem I see here is what the test setup is for the Intel i7 system? I skimmed the article (it's huge), but never could find it. As for the testing again heavily GPU-limited over about 1280X1024 (and in some cases literally right off the bat at 1024X768). Once they hit 1600X1200 with the single 280 the cpu's have just stalled waiting for the GPU. This still doesn't explain the Crysis: Warhead numbers which show the i7 LOWER than the AMD cpu's @ 1600X1200. My guess is the percent error in the testing is large and so pretty much anything within 5% is equal (again denoting the GPU-bottleneck).
I won't comment on Tom's as that site has lost all respect with me.
But we've all known that gaming performance with the latest (or even previous generation CPU's) when not also using CF/SLI or stupidly low resolutions DOES NOT make a huge difference with most games (some RTS/FlightSim/FarCry2/etc. excluded). decided to try that way back with Conroe to show how it wasn't so great for gaming (testing everything under completely GPU-limited scenarios).
This isn't news.