AMD's Athlon II X3 435 & New Energy Efficient CPUs: Killing Intel Below $90
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 20, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
3dsmax 9 - SPECapc 3dsmax CPU Rendering Test
Today's desktop processors are more than fast enough to do professional level 3D rendering at home. To look at performance under 3dsmax we ran the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 benchmark (only the CPU rendering tests) under 3dsmax 9 SP1. The results reported are the rendering composite scores:
Compared to the Intel dual-core options, the Athlon II X3 435 is a definite winner here. It's got the core count and clock speed to beat the old Penryn derivatives. Its biggest competition comes from its own family, the Athlon II X4 620 is the better buy here.
Cinebench R10
Created by the Cinema 4D folks we have Cinebench, a popular 3D rendering benchmark that gives us both single and multi-threaded 3D rendering results.
As I've been mentioning this entire time, the Athlon II X3 435 doesn't really sacrifice clock speed in its three-core configuration. At 2.9GHz even its single threaded performance is comparable to the Pentium E6300. Run a multithreaded app however and the performance goes from parity to leading:
POV-Ray 3.73 beta 23 Ray Tracing Performance
POV-Ray is a popular, open-source raytracing application that also doubles as a great tool to measure CPU floating point performance.
I ran the SMP benchmark in beta 23 of POV-Ray 3.73. The numbers reported are the final score in pixels per second.
The POV-Ray results echo what we've been seeing thus far, vs. Intel there's no contest - the 435 is the better value. Compared to the quad-core Athlon IIs however, the 435 isn't very good.
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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
177 Comments
View All Comments
Fleeb - Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - link
Or maybe, these three are just the same person craving for attention in real life he cannot have. Do not hate the guy. Pity him.mapesdhs - Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - link
Sorry for the double post! The submission form just gave an error
the first time round, but I guess it went through anyway. Anand,
please feel free to delete this post and my previous duplicate.
Ian.
mapesdhs - Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - link
Anand, just curious, the test platform description includes mention
of an X58 mbd, yet there are no i7 results in the tables. How come?
Then again, including a couple of data points from a P55 with an
i5 750 and i7 860 would be more useful. AMD wins on price by a mile
of course (personally I reckon the 620 is the best buy much of the
time) but for those occasions where only 1 or 2 threads are running,
the i5 750 might win on price/performance. If it's deemed appropriate
to include a top-end Ph2 in the results, then surely at the very
least the i5 750 should have been included aswell just to put things
into perspective? I would include an 860 aswell just to show where
the curves are heading on the Intel side, but nothing above that.
And btw no, I don't agree with anything maddoctor says. Speaking of
which, can you please ban the guy? Once again the discussion section
of an otherwise interesting article is just being filled up with
junk. To everyone else: please don't reply to his posts, you're just
making it worse. It's a sad fact of nature that half the population
have got to be below average. Who _are_ these people? Sheesh, I can
almost hear the banjo, da da ding ding ding... :D
Ian.
PS. One other thing Anand, have you ever tested how high the 620
can be oc'd with a *good* air cooler? I know the retail AMD cooler
allows it to reach 3.25, but what about with something better? Someone
mentioned the Coolermaster Hyper TX2 as being a suitable alternative.
rupa - Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - link
hi ... my 620 is stable till 3.380 (260x13) - noctua nh-u12p default vcore x64 asus m3a78tmapesdhs - Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - link
Anand, just curious, the test platform description includes mention
of an X58 mbd, yet there are no i7 results in the tables. How come?
Then again, including a couple of data points from a P55 with an
i5 750 and i7 860 would be more useful. AMD wins on price by a mile
of course (personally I reckon the 620 is the best buy much of the
time) but for those occasions where only 1 or 2 threads are running,
the i5 750 might win on price/performance. If it's deemed appropriate
to include a top-end Ph2 in the results, then surely at the very
least the i5 750 should have been included aswell just to put things
into perspective? I would include an 860 aswell just to show where
the curves are heading on the Intel side, but nothing above that.
And btw no, I don't agree with anything maddoctor says. Speaking of
which, can you please ban the guy? Once again the discussion section
of an otherwise interesting article is just being filled up with
junk. To everyone else: please don't reply to his posts, you're just
making it worse. It's a sad fact of nature that half the population
have got to be below average. Who _are_ these people? Sheesh, I can
almost hear the banjo, da da ding ding ding... :D
Ian.
PS. One other thing Anand, have you ever tested how high the 620
can be oc'd with a *good* air cooler? I know the retail AMD cooler
allows it to reach 3.25, but what about with something better? Someone
mentioned the Coolermaster Hyper TX2 as being a suitable alternative.
Zool - Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - link
For a fast compare with other procesors the test setup is not bad but for some people some the benchmarks could be misleading.People will not buy these cpu-s just to put them together with a intel SSD drive and a gtx280.
I think it wouldnt take much longer to test it with average hdd and a sub 100$ gpu. I would care much less if i cant compare it to other anad tests with high end cpus.
Zool - Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - link
For a fast compare with other procesors the test setup is not bad but for some people some the benchmarks could be misleading.People will not buy these cpu-s just to put them together with a intel SSD drive and a gtx280.
I think it wouldnt take much longer to test it with average hdd and a sub 100$ gpu. I would care much less if i cant compare it to other anad tests with high end cpus.
7Enigma - Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - link
Zool,The purpose of using an SSD is strictly for the variability between tests. What Anand's site never shows (and one of my major complaints) is % error. In any statistical measurement you always present the amount of error in a test. What this might show is there is no REAL clear winner, or very little difference as when you get close (say within 5%), and you have a large variability (say due to a standard HD or run-to-run variability), the numbers become moot.
I will agree with you on the GTX280, however, as that is a pointless component for this price sector.
7Enigma - Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - link
As an example I went back and looked at the game data. The Fallout3 data is generated MANUALLY by running through an area and using FRAPS. The X2/X3 chips are bunched up with less than 1 fps between them. I would wager a hefty sum that the % error in this test is greater than 1fps and so any chips within that range are EQUAL. Same goes for Left 4 Dead...maddoctor - Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - link
I don't see anything wrong for the benchmark setup, but other SSD products are not competitive and have lower performance than Intel products. The most wrong thing about is Anand is compare AMD rubbish product to Intel products.