AMD's New Year Refresh: Athlon II X4 635, Phenom II X2 555, Athlon II X2 255 & Athlon II X3 440
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 25, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
SYSMark 2007 Performance
Our journey starts with SYSMark 2007, the only all-encompassing performance suite in our review today. The idea here is simple: one benchmark to indicate the overall performance of your machine.
Given its age, SYSMark is more of a lightly threaded benchmark by today's standards. Dual core processors (or quad-core chips with aggressive turbo modes) do quite well here. AMD's Phenom II X2 555 BE does better than anything else in its price range. The Core 2 Duo E7500 is probably a good indicator of the Pentium E6600's performance, and it just equals the perf of the 555 BE.
The triple and quad-core chips don't do that well here, there just aren't enough threads to go around.
Adobe Photoshop CS4 Performance
To measure performance under Photoshop CS4 we turn to the Retouch Artists’ Speed Test. The test does basic photo editing; there are a couple of color space conversions, many layer creations, color curve adjustment, image and canvas size adjustment, unsharp mask, and finally a gaussian blur performed on the entire image.
The whole process is timed and thanks to the use of Intel's X25-M SSD as our test bed hard drive, performance is far more predictable than back when we used to test on mechanical disks.
Time is reported in seconds and the lower numbers mean better performance. The test is multithreaded and can hit all four cores in a quad-core machine.
If you have threads and need cores, AMD has the medicine. The $119 Athlon II X4 635 handles our Photoshop test with the same elegance as Intel's Core i3 530. The Phenom II X2 555 BE and the Athlon II X2 255 are on par with the Pentium E6300 and should both be a bit slower than the E6600.
x264 HD Video Encoding Performance
Graysky's x264 HD test uses the publicly available x264 encoder to convert a 4Mbps 720p MPEG-2 source. The focus here is on quality rather than speed, thus the benchmark uses a 2-pass encode and reports the average frame rate in each pass.
For video-encoding you can't beat the value of the Athlon II X4 635. You get the performance of a quad-core Intel that will set you back another $40. The triple-core Athlon II X3 440 does well here, besting all previous generation dual-core CPUs. Only the Core i3 530 is faster, and more expensive. The Phenom II X2 555 BE and the Athlon II X2 255 perform similarly to their equivalently priced Intel CPUs.
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SmCaudata - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
It is very good to look at the CPU vs CPU cost for performance but look at the total cost. Comparing these chips isn't that fair really. I can go to Microcenter and pick up an x4 620 for $90 and get my choice of 2 motherboards from $20 - $60. Even without these package discounts the AMD motherboards are much cheaper. The cheapest Intel boards are dipping in the low $90s right now for the i3s and i5s. You do get a few added features with the H44/H57 boards but it is a big price difference in the end. I personally have owned intel for my last 3 builds but at the low end it isn't nearly as close of a competition as your article points out. Heck, even P45 boards are still in the $90 range for one with needed features.Penti - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 - link
BTW look at this deal, http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.asp...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.asp...It's not much. Sure you can get 785G boards for $42 after rebates and MIR. $138 USD total for 785G and X4 620. But the Intel is still a good platform for them money. Board comes down to $71 after rebates any how. I guess you can compare the $100 boards with AMDs $85-105 dollar 785G/790GX boards. You get quad-core, but a slower processor.
strikeback03 - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
And you would really trust a $20 motherboard?formulav8 - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Yes I would and do. I've built many upon many computers and $20-$50 mobo's work very well. Its not like the older days. Manuf like ECS even make the higher end boards for the higher end names. I believe Abit is one of their customers.So yes a $20 mobo works just fine. Obviously don't expect all of the bells and such, but the bang for the buck systems is definitely on AMD's side.
They give me a nice profit margin. Which is always a good thing. :)
PS: Apart from my own desktop and my wifes desktop which both uses Intel chips, customer builds has been using AMD for quite awhile now do to the bang you get from them.
Jason
Penti - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 - link
Abit had their own manufacturing, now they are owned by contract manufacturer USI or Universal Scientific Industrial Co., Ltd.ECS is a contract manufacturer (ODM) like all the others but mostly makes low end stuff especially under their own brand. (ECS/PC Chips). And of course supplies the OEMs. I wouldn't rank them higher then any of the others.
Companies like EVGA, XFX and BFG are factory less and their products are produced (mostly) by Foxconn. They are of course also american companies so theres no surprise there.
kmmatney - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
From a stability point of view, I've had better luck with cheaper motherboards, since they usually have very limited overclocking options. Cheaper boards also tend to run a little slower, but as i said I've always found them to be stable, since there is not much than can go wrong.medi01 - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Agreed, motherboard costs should be taken into account.StevoLincolnite - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Did you guys try and unlock the cores? I was a lucky sod that managed to get an Athlon 2 X4 620 to have all of it's cache unlocked, essentially turning it into a Phenom 2 X4 910 but at a much lower price.PCWizKid - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
I unlocked all 4 cores on the Phenom II X4 555 BE , check out my review here http://tinyurl.com/phenomii555">http://tinyurl.com/phenomii555v12v12 - Friday, January 29, 2010 - link
Wow... I don't know how old you are, but that was an excellently narrated review. Very few, if any hang ups or awkward pauses; you seem to have a talent for that... could be worth something to you in the future buddy. All these tech-TV shows/websites need competent reviewers and such for shows like CES etc. Could have a future out there doing something unusually nice!As for the 555... WOW now that's a legendary sized unlock! Where have chips like these been lately, in AMDs line up? I haven't seen something like that from AMD since the L1-L2 bridge Pen/super-glue gap-able AXPs and unlocked mobile XP-Ms. That was quite a long time ago... haha.
Hope AMD comes with more than a few fancy OC tricks though... then again, Intel's pet project group will take notice of this very unusually easy unlock trick, and hopefully release a special batch of chips as retort. Gotta love CPU competition, esp when OC'ing potential comes into factor for the Manus... b/c really, they could completely lock up all these chips for no OC'ing period... so they do occasionally toss use nuggets.
...OC 4 Life.