AMD Athlon X2 7850 vs. Intel Pentium E5300: Choosing the Best $70 CPU
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 28, 2009 11:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
DivX 8.5.3 with Xmpeg 5.0.3
Our DivX test is the same DivX / XMpeg 5.03 test we've run for the past few years now, the 1080p source file is encoded using the unconstrained DivX profile, quality/performance is set balanced at 5 and enhanced multithreading is enabled:
The original Phenom was significantly weaker than Intel’s Core 2 at DivX encoding, thus the Athlon X2 vs. Pentium comparison here isn’t very favorable for AMD. The E5300 is 11% faster than the 7850 here. Even the E5200 is a better choice for DivX encoding.
x264 HD Video Encoding Performance
Graysky's x264 HD test uses the publicly available x264 codec (open source alternative to H.264) to encode 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.
The x264 HD encode test is slightly different depending on what pass you look at. The first pass of the x264 HD encode actually has a number of unaligned loads, which penalizes Intel’s Core architecture - something fixed in Nehalem. The second and more CPU intensive pass is where Intel sees a 7.4% performance advantage over AMD. Despite the small advantage in the first pass of the encode, the win goes to Intel for a larger and more meaningful advantage in the second pass.
Windows Media Encoder 9 x64 Advanced Profile
In order to be codec agnostic we've got a Windows Media Encoder benchmark looking at the same sort of thing we've been doing in the DivX and x264 tests, but using WME instead.
Our final pure encode test once again has the E5300 ahead of the Athlon X2 7850, but by only a 3.4% margin.
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evanwhat - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
Please revisit this debate with overclocking factored into the picture.Many thanks,
-Evan
Patrick Wolf - Monday, May 4, 2009 - link
Why even bother with single core CPU's anymore? Why can't you throw a $50 Celeron e1400 in there? How does it compare to the lower end X2's and P4's?orenlevy - Saturday, May 2, 2009 - link
It seems you are benching the wrong hardware! You are far from the market guys.... the whole story is changing when comparing low end mobos. like G31or n73 for Intel. And 740V\g or 780G for AMD. It change totally the latency timing specially in Intel setup-there is no on die controller.agawtrip - Friday, May 1, 2009 - link
people who buy these CPUs are those on a budget.you only have two setups here - budget setups
intel e5200/e5300 + 9300/9400 boards
AMD x27750/7850 + 780G
now which is faster and has a lower price?
9300/9400 boards are faster than 780g but on a higher price. then if you're really on a budget you'll have to go for AMD set-up. if you still have some extra cash, you can put it on a video card, or extra memory or go for tri-core which will give a real nice performance, faster than OCed e5200/e5300.
dingetje - Tuesday, April 28, 2009 - link
sorry to say this, but leaving overclocking out of the equation means: FAILbigsnyder - Tuesday, April 28, 2009 - link
The article keeps referencing the e6400 as a comparison, but I don't see it in the charts from the original core 2 duo review. Am I missing something here?v12v12 - Tuesday, April 28, 2009 - link
I don't wanna toot a moral high-horse, but... I noticed the word "crippled" in the article; why on earth (aside from being cheap or broke and needing a better job) would you waste money on a crippled piece of hard ware.Let me break this down: So a manufacturer produces a product X with 4 cores or whatever. Now they say "hey we've created this product and want a certain amount of compensation." So, the cost of production, advertising blah blah is all factored into this selling price. 4 cores yadda yadda...
Now some really smart mofo says "hey we can sell the same exact product from the same fab line, but we'll just 'disable' the other cores and rebadge it as a lower model, even though it costs us little to nothing to do this since it's all the same hardware!!!" Sweet deal for AMD/Intel etc.
Can you see where this is going? I would never buy something that someone purposefully disabled cores that are on the chip, that could be active and working perfectly, but they've decided to be greedy (not necessarily bad) and disable them unless you pay another higher fee. So all someone (them) has to do is flip a switch or connect some traces and boom you have the true product as intended. So in essence, it costs them little to nothing to cripple this thing, yet charge a bit less for another “product,” which in reality is NOT another product, it's the same dang thing but crippled.
Smart business practice yes... good for the consumer's wallet? No. Profits Vs Consumers. Often times consumers (cattle) find themselves rationalizing or justifying these shady profit-practices, BUT ask yourselves; would they or do they have much concern for your wallet... Yes they do, they are concerned with getting as much money from you as they can regardless of performance or not. 2 active cores or 4... they don't care so long as you're paying as much as they can get.. It costs them X to make this CPU, and they want to find a reasonable profit margin Vs costs of production, but yet they can still sell you the SAME hardware, just switched off at a MUCH lower price??? WOW these guys are deviously intelligent. Can’t say the same about many of their customers…
:-/
chowmanga - Tuesday, April 28, 2009 - link
You're missing the point of disabling cores and selling them for cheaper price. Silicone yields aren't 100%. A lot of times these cpu's come out with defected so rather than scrapping the whole thing, they rebadge it them and sell them for cheap. They aren't necessarily "active and working perfectly"kopilka - Saturday, January 16, 2010 - link
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Doc01 - Tuesday, July 27, 2010 - link
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