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
3dsmax Performance
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:
The trend continues under 3dsmax. If you're running a highly threaded workload, there's no better value than the Athlon II X4 635 (although the Core i3 530 does come close). For the price of a dual-core CPU, the Athlon II X3 440 does the same thing.
With the Phenom II X2 555 BE performing similarly to the Pentium E6300, it'll be slower than the equivalently priced E6600. Surprisingly enough, AMD's new dual-core options aren't really that interesting in multithreaded workloads.
Cinebench R10 Performance
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.
And this is where the tradeoff becomes apparent The Athlon II X4 and X3 have the single threaded performance of a value dual-core Intel CPU. Crank up the thread count and the X3 and X4 do very well, but on more normal tasks they sub-optimal. These chips are for those who know exactly what they want.
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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.