More of AMD’s Brazos E-350 with the MSI X370 and Sony VAIO YB
by Jarred Walton & Dustin Sklavos on March 14, 2011 4:50 PM ESTGaming, Circa 2006
I’m still in the process of benchmarking other test systems, and it will probably be a couple of weeks, but I have nearly completed testing of 23 older/less-demanding games running on the E-350. I also tossed in a few titles that are neither old nor undemanding, like Civ5. All of the reported figures are generally from “Low” detail settings, though a few games have slightly modified settings. I also tested many of the titles at slightly higher quality settings to see what would happen. The table below summarizes the performance.
| AMD E-350 Performance in Older Games | |||
| Title | Detail Setting | E-350 FPS | Notes |
|
Batman: Arkham Asylum |
Low | 29 | Sluggish at times and appears mostly CPU limited; anything more than "Medium" is out of the question. |
| Battlefield 2 | Low | 50.8 | Easily playable at Medium detail as well with >30FPS. |
| Civilization IV | Medium | 27 | The game is playable and cursor input is separate from the frame rate; however, CPU performance can make later turns in large games take a long time. |
| Civilization V | Minimum, DX9/DX11 | 9.0/11.8 | Even at minimum detail, performance is pretty bad, although DX11 outperforms DX9 at minimum detail. Like several other games in our list, mouse input is handled separately from frame rates, so technically the game is playable. The opening video also stutters and has issues, but it can play back fine in Windows Media Player. Given the slow CPU and GPU performance in this title, I'd recommend skipping this on Brazos. |
| Company of Heroes | Low | 44 | Average frame rates are good, but performance can drop into the low teens at times. |
| Crysis: Warhead | Minimum | 21.6 | There's nothing to do for Crysis; it's too much for E-350. |
| Fallout 3 | Low | 32.9 | Minimum frame rates can drop into the 20s, but in general the game is playable. |
| Far Cry | Low | 49.6 | Definitely playable; Medium detail still averages nearly 40FPS. |
| Far Cry 2 | Low | 21.3 | Even at minimum detail, FC2 runs poorly on E-350. |
| F.E.A.R. | Minimum | 100 | Minimum frame rates were 40; you can definitely increase detail levels. |
| Half-Life 2 | Low | 31.9 | This is one of the demanding sections (the Strider battle in City 17); elsewhere the game runs faster and is very playable. |
| Half-Life 2: Episode Two | Low | 26.8 | Episode Two is also playable, but as indicated here you'll get some choppiness in some areas. |
| League of Legends | Low | 21.7 | 22FPS may seem low, but the game is playable since mouse input is separate from the frame rate; too slow for competitive players. |
| Minecraft | Far + Fast | 22.5 | This is an outdoor test where frame rates were low. Mining, you see performance into the 60+ FPS range. Drop the view distance to "Normal" and you basically double the frame rate. |
| Need for Speed: World | Low | 33.5 | You get periodic hiccups where the frame rate will drop severely; this seems to be server related, though, and most of the time you'll get 30+ FPS and can definitely play the game. |
| Oblivion | Low | 20.2 | Ultra Low settings will improve performance but look really poor. This is an outdoor area with lots of trees, and even at 20FPS Oblivion is manageable. |
| Quake 4 | Low | 57.3 | No problems at low detail, as Q4 is one of the first id games to support SMP; at higher settings it still breaks 30FPS. |
| STALKER: SoC | Static + Min | 53.2 | Turn off static lighting and performance plummets into the 20s. |
| Supreme Commander | Low | 12.6 | Far too CPU intensive to run on the E-350/Bobcat core. |
| Team Fortress 2 | Low | 37.8 | Even at maximum detail, performance didn’t change. This may be a driver bug, but you can at least play TF2 casually. |
| Torchlight | Netbook | 45.7 | Netbook mode runs great; at maximum detail without AA, you'll still get 22FPS, so somewhere in between minimum and maximum detail is the sweet spot. |
| Unreal Tournament 3 | Low | 29.7 | UT3 is too demanding on the CPU for competitive play, but you can game casually. You'd want to go for UT2K4 for optimal performance from an Unreal Tournament game. |
| World of Warcraft | Fair | 49.6 | I played through level 25 without trouble; even with Fair settings and maximum view distance I didn't have any problems. I can't speak to the performance in later raids, but casual players should be fine. |
You can see the results of testing a broader selection of games are about as expected. Unreal Engine has always been a bit harder on the CPU than the GPU, so performance is lower than other games of that era. Quake 4 is the other side of the spectrum: it wants more GPU memory bandwidth than CPU performance, and the E-350 delivers enough to make everything besides anti-aliasing viable (at least for single-player). Several of the titles have somewhat low frame rates, but they’re still enjoyable because of the way the game is designed. Both Civilization games fall into this category, along with League of Legends.
Out of the 23 titles tested above, only three are definitely not playable at native resolution: Crysis, Far Cry 2, and Supreme Commander. [Update: Civ5 should probably be skipped as well.] The former two are somewhat newer titles, but I had requests to run them so that’s why they’re in the list. (Dropping to 800x600 might bring performance up to 30FPS, but I doubt many users are really interested in going that route as there are plenty of other options.)
Overall, gaming in the 2006 and earlier era is very doable on E-350, and you can even play some recent less-demanding games. Need for Speed: World for instance ran well enough that I played it for a few hours without any serious complaints—network lag was a bigger problem than frame rates. If you’re looking for gaming options, you might consider checking out the March issue of PC Gamer where they list their top 100 games of all time. At a quick glance, I’d say at least 80% of the games they listed would run well enough on E-350 to be enjoyable.
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lammers42 - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
"Contrary to what you might expect, the 64Wh battery actually more than doubles battery life, suggesting the cells may be higher quality than in the 4-cell option."I've been telling everyone this for a long time . . . if you have the choice choose the higher capacity battery . . . they seem to use better performing cells.
It still doesn't explain why there is such a big difference between the different manufacturers in the quality of batteries of approximately the same capacity used which is evident from the relative battery life chart you show. As you get more Brazos systems to test it will be interesting to see if that will hold true.
Tasslehoff Burrfoot - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
Brazos platforms should be under 350$ and at least under 400$. These manufacturers are getting carried away and they're even making fail noteboooks to top that off -_-All Zacate notebooks I've seen this far have either had disappointing specs (too little memory or too small resolution with too large display size or usin some lower processor model than the E-350) or horrible looks...
...or both.
Where is my all black matte ~12'' brazos lappie with sturdy chassis, 1440x900 resolution and an outstanding battery life? Why can't anybody get this simple thing right?
blacklist - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
the closest approximation to what you want is probably the lenovo x120e. or just wait for the upcoming lenovo s205.silverblue - Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - link
3GB is more than enough for something this size, in my opinion. You're not going to be throwing massive workloads at the thing. I don't see why you'd want a 1440x900 resolution unless you're not gaming or the games aren't particularly tough on the hardware to begin with; what would you personally use a Brazos machine for, if I may ask?heraldo25 - Thursday, March 17, 2011 - link
I'm wondering how the E-350 and C-50 would fare against the first generation of Pentium M processors, are there any benchmarks like that?L. - Friday, March 18, 2011 - link
The first generation of pentium M processors were extremely bad iirc.If this beats a cheap C2D , it beats a pentium M. (or I don't remember which one is the pentium M, either way beating a cheap C2D is decent performance indeed).
But in all fairness, comparing the brazos to a pentium M is an insult to the brazos because the pentium M was a p3-P4 design mix, two designs that never handled multithreading in a decent fashion, and never got close to either AMD in that regard, or the subsequent C2D, which in most non-single-thread applications was much much faster.
So if you want comparisons, start with a decent chip, like a cheap C2D, or if you want to go back even more, barton athlons (yes, because those could do multithreading).
silverblue - Saturday, March 19, 2011 - link
I'd be more interested in comparing to Athlon 64s, both the single core variants and the X2s, considering AMD said Brazos should be close in performance to a similarly clocked Athlon 64 (90% I believe).JarredWalton - Saturday, March 19, 2011 - link
I suppose it depends on which Athlon 64 chip you're looking at. The K625 is actually clocked at 1.5GHz compared to 1.6GHz on the E-350. If we just focus on tasks that are pure CPU benchmarks:Cinebench 10 Single-Core: K625 is 47% faster
Cinebench 10 Multi-Core: K625 is 47% faster
x264 First Pass: K625 is 40% faster
x264 Second Pass: K625 is 29% faster
If they were aiming for 90% of the recent K10.5 Athlon II X2 chips, then, they didn't come anywhere near their goal. However, K10.5 is around 5-10% faster than K10, and K10 is probably another 15% faster than K8, so 90% of the original Athlon X2 parts is probably about right.
GTKevin - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link
Has anyone released a brazos platform laptop with a rotatable touchscreen so that it can be used as a tablet? I know the form factor will be bulky compared to a dedicated tablet, but for someone who is currently tabletless and likes to read ebooks in his free time, such a product would be very useful.aop - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
Any hope on you guys taking apart a Fusion laptop like HP DM1z and make article about it's internals? It would be nice to see how the cooling is done and what kind of layout do the motherboards have etc.