The Sandy Bridge Pentium Review: G850, G840, G620 & G620T Tested

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• yo2020 - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link

  for both idle and load. :D

• Havor - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link

  For anyone that wants to build a low power system, dont look for a 620T or 2100T, they will only cost you actually more money and save's you almost no energy or even cost you extra if you do heavy loads like encoding.
  
  After looking up a lot of sites and comparing idle loads i made the following list, and radical changed the dissension on what CPU to use for my server.
  
  CPU (total system use) Idle/Load
  E-350 26W /38W
  Pentium G620 Undervolt @ 0.9GHz 31W/43W
  Pentium G620 31W /60W
  Pentium G840 31W /60W
  Pentium G850 32W /65W
  Core i3 2100 33W /69W
  Athlon X2 240e 34W/84W
  i3 2120 33W /84W
  i5 2400 34W /99W
  i5 2500K 34W /110W
  i7 2600K 35W /125W
  i7-2600K (4.85GHz) 39W/190W
  
  The idle difference between a G620T and a i7 2600K is only 4 watts, and yes under load the 2600K uses 2x the amount of watts, but at the same time it also dose 4x the amount of work, so with the "instruction per watt" (IPW) you are better of with a 2500K/2600K
  
  So now I turn my main system of when i dont need it, and let my server that's 24/7 on anyway, do all the work.
  
  So if a system is needed that needs to do heavy CPU work like encoding, but you still want a energy lean machine, a fast CPU could not be suds a bad idea after all.
  
  Just something to think about ;-)

• Marlin1975 - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link

  These are well suited for HTPC but you did not compare them in that regard?
  
  Very few care about synthetic benchmarks, test these for real world uses like HTPC where many are looking to use low-end cpus like these.
  Also you can still overclock the intel cpus just not much. Why not overclock the A6/A8 and the intel chips to compare as well?

• dubyadubya - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link

  Seems everyone has forgotten about 64 bit programs. There is zero mention of 64 bit programs in most reviews on the net. Testing using mainly 32 bit programs and not stating which programs are 32/64 bit give the impression that Intel's SB is way faster than AMD's offerings. AMD offerings perform much better running 64 bit code than Intel's SB so lets see some multi-threaded 64 bit testing.

• Traciatim - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link

  Benchmark links?

• A5 - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link

  You're going to have to back that up.

• silverblue - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link

  Either you're saying that AMD's CPUs perform better in 64-bit mode than 32-bit mode, or that AMD's CPUs are better at x86-84 than Sandy Bridge. Regardless, as stated, you'll need to provide some evidence to back this up.

• AngryMonkeyMob - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link

  While it is true that AMD can keep competitive on price/performance, when it comes to power consumption AMD gets it the hot bullets of shotgun when compared to Intels baked goods. That matters to some people ( it does to me ). I'd use this in a tiny ITX machine with something like this http://www.logicsupply.com/products/ga620ibk_a1
  
  ...But I'd imagine that makes me a minority around here :)

• Death666Angel - Friday, August 26, 2011 - link

  If you do something that specific, surely you know how to undervolt a CPU? :-) AMDs Llano can be undervolted quite heavily as far as I know and the 65W TDP chips (A8-3800 and A6-3600 afaik) will already perform much more energy conscious out of the box. :-)

• CeriseCogburn - Monday, June 25, 2012 - link

  Since you quibble on 5 or 20 bucks when it comes to a crap apu, and spend minimum $124.00+ on a tiny computer case, yes, I'd say, God Willing, you are in the minority around here, but I fear, that you definitely are not.
  
  Oh the irony