The Phenom II X4 810 & X3 720: AMD Gets DDR3 But Doesn't Need It
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 9, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
3dsmax 9 - SPECapc 3dsmax CPU Rendering Test
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 Phenom II 900 and 800 series are once again competitive with the equivalent Intel offerings. Since we're dealing with a well threaded workload, the Phenom II X3 720 manages to inch ahead of its Core 2 Duo competitors.
Cinebench R10
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.
Taxing only a single core all you can rely on is frequency, hence the E7500 being at the top of the charts. But we are in the multi-core era, so let's look at the multi-threaded results:
AMD does very well in the multi-threaded Cinebench test thanks to its architectu, only the fastest Core 2s and of course Core i7 are able to outperform the Phenom II. The triple core 720 has a clear advantage over its dual core competitors here.
POV-Ray 3.73 beta 23 Ray Tracing Performance
POV-Ray is a popular, open-source raytracing application that also doubles as a great tool to measure CPU floating point performance.
I ran the SMP benchmark in beta 23 of POV-Ray 3.73. The numbers reported are the final score in pixels per second.
AMD continues to do quite well in POV-ray. The 900, 800 and 700 series are all competitive.
PAR2 Multithreaded Archive Recovery Performance
Par2 is an application used for reconstructing downloaded archives. It can generate parity data from a given archive and later use it to recover the archive
Chuchusoft took the source code of par2cmdline 0.4 and parallelized it using Intel’s Threading Building Blocks 2.1. The result is a version of par2cmdline that can spawn multiple threads to repair par2 archives. For this test we took a 708MB archive, corrupted nearly 60MB of it, and used the multithreaded par2cmdline to recover it. The scores reported are the repair and recover time in seconds.
The more cores the merrier; AMD does very well in our par2 test, especially down at the X3 720 level. Nothing can touch the 8-threads of madness that is Core i7 however, but today we're talking about much lower price points.
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just4U - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
I think you were a bit optimistic in your prediction that DDR3 will be at price parity with DDR2 by years end but otherwise a good review.I do have a question tho as I am not 100% sure on it. The cpu's that were launched in January (920/40). Are they also compatable with DDR3 boards? Or just these new cpu's?
faxon - Friday, May 1, 2009 - link
really? because right now newegg is selling a 2x2GB kit of Gskill cas9 1600 for $59, and the like kit of DDR2 cas5 is only $56. all we need now is for latency on the ram to drop at the same low voltages seen on i7 kits and i would call that price parity, not that you will even really notice the latency difference except in synthetic benchmarks anymoreDrMrLordX - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
To the best of my knowledge, AM2 and AM2+ Phenom/Phenom IIs will not support DDR3. Their memory controllers just can't hack it.hyc - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
How so? Barcelona/Phenom-I already had the dual memory controllers, they were just never enabled on any motherboards.Targon - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
For DDR3 support you need a DDR3 supporting CPU. From the sound of it, the processors are the socket AM3 type, meaning they will work in both socket AM2+ and socket AM3 motherboards. If a processor is for socket AM2/AM2+, it will NOT work in a DDR3 motherboard.The way it works is simple, the DDR3 versions of the processor have both DDR2 and DDR3 memory controllers, so will work with either type of memory. The DDR2 processors(X4 940 and 920) only have a DDR2 memory controller(it is dual channel, but that isn't the same as supporting both memory types), so will only work in a socket AM2 or AM2+ motherboard.
The X4 945 and 925(I think) will be the DDR3 supporting versions of the current chips.
Again, you can NOT put a socket AM2+ chip in a DDR3 board, it won't work(pin is blocked in the socket to avoid frying the chip). Even if you could put the chip in a DDR3 board, without the DDR3 memory controller on the CPU, it just would not work.
grb1212 - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - link
your not totally right if u have a am2/am2+/am3 compatible board and it uses ddr3 if u use a ddr2 compatible processor ddr3 will work with a ddr2 processor but it will act like ddr2 memory as far ass performanceTheFace - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
This may help.http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/socket-am3-phe...">http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/socket-am3-phe...
The chips released today seem to be the only ones that work in AM3. But the chips released today will also work in AM2/AM2+. It's just, as has been stated repeatedly, the chips designed for AM2/AM2+ won't work in AM3.