The Sandy Bridge Pentium Review: G850, G840, G620 & G620T Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 23, 2011 12:11 AM ESTThe Matchup
The Sandy Bridge Pentiums go head to head with AMD's Athlon II and to a lesser extent the new triple-core AMD A6. At the low end we have the Athlon II X2 260 vs. Intel's Pentium G620. AMD has the clock speed advantage (3.2GHz vs. 2.6GHz) but Sandy Bridge does offer better performance at the same clock, we'll have to see if the 600MHz advantage is too much for Intel to overcome.
Moving on up AMD gets to throw more cores at the competition. The Athlon II X3 455 (3.3GHz) has three cores to the Pentium G840's two (2.8GHz), although the clock speed advantage shrinks a bit.
Finally compared to the Pentium G850 we have two options from AMD. If you can find one there's the Athlon II X4 635. The clock speed advantage goes away completely but AMD delivers twice the cores of Intel's Pentium G850. The 635 is no longer on AMD's price list so your chances of finding one at a reasonable price go down considerably. The Athlon II X3 460 is the only other similarly priced competitor, and its performance should be similar to the 455 I mentioned above.
Meet the A6
Although at a slightly higher price point than the most expensive Sandy Bridge Pentium, we also have a lower cost member of the Llano family: AMD's A6-3650. For $20 less than the flagship 3850, the A6-3650 loses 300MHz on the CPU clock and lops off 80 GPU cores. The GPU also runs at a slower 443MHz frequency. The TDP remains unchanged at 100W. Given the small price difference between a 3650 and a 3850 I'd much rather opt for the latter but we'll see what the slower GPU does to performance when every dollar counts.
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iwod - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
The sad thing is AMD is still using a CPU core then is two generation behind Intel. We will have to wait for Bulldozer + updated GPU for a decent low end CPU.However by the time Intel would have either Ivy or Haswell ready.
AMD you need to work harder.
CeriseCogburn - Monday, June 25, 2012 - link
iwod, you may have waited, and achieved: massive, epic failure, amd style...Since amd still has to be sold with endless lies, everyone knows the answer that few are willing to admit.
I congratule on amd lying about bulldozer transistor count, fanning their fanboys to the outer limits of worshipful surrender.
Targon - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
Now that Firefox and IE9 support GPU acceleration, adding these to the CPU benchmarks SHOULD be seen as fairly important when talking about low to mid range processors/GPUs. I suspect that if running Firefox 6 with Flash(due to banner advertisements and such), you might see some interesting results on a per-core basis between the AMD A6 and Intel Pentium chips reviewed here.fuzzymath10 - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
I'm pretty sure you need only DX10 for that. My laptop's x3100 IGP from 2008 supports h/w rendering because the driver is DX10. Flash video decoding is more restricted, but it's possible the new Intel IGPs will work since they have DXVA decoding of h.264.Targon - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
The GPU acceleration obviously will be better with a faster GPU in browsers and Flash, and that helps level the playing field in this case. I would like to see how much it levels the playing field.JarredWalton - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
If you have a good benchmark for measuring performance in IE9 and FF6, I'd love to hear it. Sure, I can open up a Flash video, but on any modern GPU (including Arrandale's IGP), it's not a problem. Even GMA 4500MHD could handle Flash video content with the latest drivers (helped by the CPU of course).The problem is coming up with a meaningful benchmark with browsers. Are we supposed to look at CPU usage while watching a video, or power usage? Do we go to some weird web page benchmark that stresses the GPU accelerated portions of the browser, even though 99% of web sites look like our site and don't benefit? I've got from Firefox 1 through 6, most versions of Chrome, every major Internet Explorer release, and I've even dabbled with Safari (sucks on Windows!) and Opera. Unless you're playing Flash games, I haven't ever felt that any of the browsers was "too slow"; mostly I stuck with FF for the extensions, but I've moved to Chrome now. Both still run fine whether I'm on IGP or dGPU.
I guess my point is, sure, you can create a browser test that stresses GPUs/CPUs to the point where it's a benchmark, but is it actually useful data? If a web site is putting a 100% load on your CPU, GPU, or both, it's a poorly designed site for normal use.
knedle - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
I have bought few months ago 620T, compared to AMD I was previously using, power consumption is much smaller, same goes for noise, I can't hear it with stock cooling.My whole computer with high quality PSU, 3 HHDs (all power saving), a DVD and some basic ASUS motherboard takes only 60W in stress, and for things I do with this computer, it's far more superior than AMD.
I should mention, that I use my computer as server for backups of my customers servers, so I need high IO rate without any bottlenecks, and AMD always gave me problems with that. For example, AMD had problems while I wanted to watch a movie, while 2 servers were sendbing backups to my computer and saving it to LVM on software RAID array.
koan00 - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
On page 3, the link to "Bench" is broken in the second sentenceAlso, the hardware setup lists a Corsair drive for the Hard Disk, but then 2 paragraphs down references the Intel XM25-M ?
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
The Bench link looks fine here. What are you seeing?koan00 - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
It initially linked to "http://www.anandtech.com/show/4524/the-sandy-bridg... but it appears to be correct now. Thanks.