The Sandy Bridge Pentium Review: G850, G840, G620 & G620T Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 23, 2011 12:11 AM ESTProcessor Graphics Performance
The Sandy Bridge Pentium lineup features the performance equivalent of Intel's HD Graphics 2000. AMD's A6-3650 on the other hand sports a 320 core GPU called the Radeon HD 6530D. How do the two stack up? What about compared to the A8-3850's Radeon HD 6550D? We're about to find out.
We'll start with the A6-3650 vs. the Pentium G850. I didn't include the slower Pentiums because there's simply no point to. The A6-3650's Radeon HD 6530D GPU is on average 2.33x the speed of the Pentium G850 across all of our tests and all resolutions. There's simply no competition and at these frame rates, even at 1024 x 768, I wouldn't consider the G850's graphics playable unless you go to older games or really make the game look terrible.
AMD A6 vs. AMD A8
What about the AMD A6 vs. A8? On average the A8's higher GPU clock and 80 extra GPU cores give it an 18 - 26% performance advantage over the A6's GPU depending on resolution. Both systems here use DDR3-1600 memory and despite memory bandwidth being constrained across the board, the A8's advantage increases with resolution.
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blazeoptimus - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
I realize that this mostly focuses on desktop parts, but in the mobile space, the e-350 tends to go head to head with a B940, (which is a slower version of the G620T). Something most stores (ala BestBuy) will say is that if you want graphics performance, go with the e-350 based laptop, and if you want cpu power, go with the B940 laptop. I suspect, that other than HTPC specific tasks, the B940 is a generally superior option.flipmode - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
article quote:None of the Pentiums support AES-NI or VT-d.
Wait, wait, wait - so does that mean that you can't run Windows XP Mode or just that it will have fairly crummy performance?
Either way, that's a deal breaker for me.
elevants - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
They don't support Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d)They all do support VT-x. And XP mode runs fine.
Besides XP mode runs without VT-x as well.
For VT-d you need platform support anyway.
So no deal breaking here. :)
More info: http://ark.intel.com/products/53490/Intel-Pentium-...
kallogan - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
The power consumption graphic is weird, we can see that the core i3 2100 is consuming more juice tha the core i3 540 when loaded. But i have an itx core i3 2100 setup and it consumes only 59W when loaded ( 4GB ram/corsair F60 + 2,5" 320GB seagate 7200tr). My previous itx setup with a core i3 530 was consuming 77W when loaded. So i'm not sure about your results.Belard - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
I think it would have been nice to have the AMD Phenom II X4 840 (3.2GHz) thrown into this crowd. Its still in production. It sells for $100 on Newegg.And Texas Microcenter, they've been selling it for $50 (with purchase of a motherboard $80+). For $50, its a steal compared to these chips.
Wish the A8 & A6 CPUs were cheaper... the A6-3650 should be a $99 CPU, tops.
kallogan - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
the AMD Phenom II X4 840 is nothing more than an athlon II X4, it doesn't have any L3 cache. It's a name scam.CeriseCogburn - Monday, June 25, 2012 - link
Amd's massive rebranding, far worse than the one that always gets blamed for rebranding.When will amd fans face the truth ?
Malih - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
I'm thinking of possible inclusion of system value comparison on this type of CPU tests, you can't possibly think about buying just the CPU nowadays right, you can't do anything with just CPU.I mean which one of the systems built using any of these CPUs would offer more features (eSATA, USB 3.0, Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1 Audio, VT-D, SSE, Solid Capacitor, DXVA and so on) at the same price point.
Arnulf - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
This obviously depends on the motherboard you decide upon and with the range of chocies avaliable you can get just about anything you can think of for either platform (FM1 or LGA1155).racingpht - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
There must be some problem with Crysis:Warhead benchmark. Why is1680x1050 faster than 1024x768?