AMD Athlon 2650e & X2 3250e - Better than Atom for SFF Desktops
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 31, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Platform: ION vs. Radeon HD 3200
The Dell zino HD uses an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3200. The mobile version of the desktop 780G chipset. We already know that Intel’s default Atom chipsets can’t decode HD video and have horrible gaming performance, but what about ION vs. AMD’s integrated solution?
The first test is H.264 decode acceleration. I fired up the latest version of Media Player Classic and tested x264 acceleration.
On a single core Athlon 2560e CPU utilization while playing back 13Mbps 1080p content ranged between 40% and 65%. Throw on the dual core X2 3250e and the numbers drop down into the 20% - 40% range.
Playable? Absolutely, with CPU power to spare.
Gaming Performance
Next up is gaming. Intel’s integrated graphics can’t play games at all with Atom, but ION definitely can. I fired up our World of Warcraft benchmark:
Hmm, that’s unexpected. ION + Atom is actually a bit faster than the 2650e and AMD’s integrated Radeon HD 3200. It’s a noticeable advantage. Neither is exactly smooth but the advantage here goes to ION.
Next up I tried Left 4 Dead and the roles reversed:
The 2650e was slightly faster than the Atom 330 + ION combination, but the dual core Athlon X2 3250e was clearly in the lead.
Overall it’s clear that ION, even while hampered by Atom is a potent little solution. And it’ll take more than just the Athlon 2650e to be noticeably faster in games across the board.
Flash Acceleration
I tested Flash 10.2 acceleration but was unfortunately met with the same problems I originally had in my GPU Accelerated Flash 10 article. With a 1280 x 720 desktop resolution full screen Hulu (480p) was smooth but took up 100% of the Athlon 2650e. If I scaled the desktop res too much higher I started to drop frames. Flash video in a window played just fine with manageable (but not low) CPU utilization.
This was a clean install of Windows 7 x64, so I’m not quite sure what’s going on here. Granted Flash 10.x is still in beta and perhaps there are still kinks that have to be worked out.
Flash is playable on the 2650e/3250e + Radeon HD 3200, and with the right hardware/driver combo it’ll work even better, but I’ve just had better experiences with ION in that regard.
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AznBoi36 - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
Pinetrail is useless for an HTPC ... There is HDMI, but you're limited to a max resolution of 1366x768. Pretty useless for anything above 720p HD.signorRossi - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
I read somewhere that Ion 2 for Pinetrail is in the works...Penti - Sunday, January 3, 2010 - link
They can just make a mobile graphics card that sits on some of the four PCI-e lanes available, it's PCI-e 2.0 and is more then enough for a low-end graphics solution. There's no problem there. One lane (x1) for Gigabit ethernet, One lane (x1) for wireless (Mini PCI-e) leaves two lanes (x2 or 1000MB/s uni-directional) for graphics. It's enough. Easily faster then an IGP solutions. But most will probably just go with the Broadcom Crystal HD.Kobaljov - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - link
The Zotac created a new mini-ITX board with dual-core Pineview with HDMI (similary limited res) and 2 PCIe Mini Card and a PCIe x1 slot! Price is unknown but hopefully closer to the Intel prices than the previous Ion boards.Penti - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - link
Sounds good, will definitively check it out. But it's still too resolution limited and a discrete chip would solve that. But you can solve that with a x1 graphic card :) Though not that cheap, I only know of HD4350. But at least you get full resolution HDMI then.essemzed - Thursday, December 31, 2009 - link
Just looking at the picture I think something is conspicuously missing: a socket for a microphone jack beside the phone one.Being a nettop it is very likely it will be used for VOIP applications too (Skype or whatever) and I'd really like to plug my headset jacks, both phone and mike, in the same place, not one in the front and one (hopefully) in the back.
Bad design, IMHO.
Sergio
signorRossi - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
Ever heard of USB-attached headsets? ;-)Mic/headphone tu USB adapters exist too...
Calin - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
Also, there are USB webcams with integrated audio.essemzed - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
my point was not that it is impossible to attach an headset to the box (of course it is), but that it would be impractical if you already own one of the typical kind, i.e. analog.hardwareguy - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
There's a mic jack on the back of the Zino HD, along with another headphone jack.http://gopaultech.com/files/2009/11/Dell-Zino-HD-B...">http://gopaultech.com/files/2009/11/Dell-Zino-HD-B...