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

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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 sentence
  
  Also, 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.