AMD's Fall Refresh: New Phenom II and Athlon II CPUs Balance Price and Performance
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 21, 2010 2:52 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Phenom II X6
- Athlon II
Sonar 8 Audio Mixing Performance
In our only digital audio production test we take a multi-track recording and export it to a WAV file using Sonar 8. The benchmark isn't very well threaded and prefers two very fast cores to several slower ones:
As I mentioned before, this is the biggest issue with AMD's lineup. If you're running applications that can't use the extra cores, AMD's advantage typically disappears.
Gaming Performance
At the high end, AMD's Phenom II X6 and X4 lose to the similarly priced Lynnfields. In the middle the Athlon II X4 645 and Athlon II X3 450 do very well.
With the exception of the Phenom II X6 and X4 processors, AMD is generally competitive here. Intel maintains the performance advantage above $200. There's an unusual amount of variance in our tests here (particularly old vs. new AMD results). The variance appears to be caused by the platform shift as we moved all of our AMD testing to the same 890GX motherboard. The change in performance under Dawn of War II however doesn't really change the standings.
WoW performance is governed by two threads thus negating any core count advantage. AMD loses at the high end but is competitive around the $100 mark.
Starcraft 2 performance is something we're beginning to look at. Again we have a situation where a game doesn't use more than two cores. The Phenom IIs are slower than Lynnfield, while the multi-core Athlon IIs do well against their competitors. If you're building a fast Starcraft 2 box that doesn't have to do anything else, the dual-core CPUs do better here.
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Guspaz - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
A few price to performance graphs would be nice. You know, "sysmarks per dollar", or that sort of thing. It would help identify the sweet spot in processor reviews.Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
I've been thinking about doing it for a while, it looks like there's overwhelming desire for it so I'll begin working on the best way to put it together :)Take care,
Anand
Taft12 - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
I'm not sure "Sysmarks/$" is all that more useful than a general recommendation that the results reveal quite clearly. In this article for example, the Athlon X3 is a stellar value while the Athlon X4 and i5 quad cores are also very good.However, this has been common knowledge for over a year now, so are we really getting anything we didn't already know from a "Sysmarks/$"-type of graph?
RyuDeshi - Monday, September 27, 2010 - link
I haven't been in the market for a new processor/chipset for over a year now, so price/performance is something that would be very helpful for me right now with all these newer chips since Core2 and Phenom I. So I concur with the OP, I would love to see some price references in or near some graphs.marraco - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
No, please. Do not do bar charts. Do X-Y price-performance charts. They are far more useful.vol7ron - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
I'm kind of partial to the smallnetbuilder's price-performance chart: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/index.php?option=co...You can hover to see the item.
evilspoons - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
Seconded. X-Y performance charts are the way to go!!evilspoons - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
Err, price-performance.Brucmack - Wednesday, September 22, 2010 - link
If you do that, please integrate the differences in power consumption somehow. It would be silly to save $20 by buying an AMD processor if it costs $50 more to run over its lifetime.strikeback03 - Wednesday, September 22, 2010 - link
How long would that lifetime be? 1 year? 4 years? Is the machine on all the time but idling 22 hrs a day? Is it gamed on 10 hrs a day but off the rest?