CrossFireX and the Phenom II X4 940 – Competitive or Not?
by Gary Key on February 2, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Left 4 Dead
This game is a blast and addictive to boot - provided you like killing hundreds of zombies while trying to take care of your teammates and sustaining high blood pressure rates. What we really like about Source engine games is their ability to run well on variety of systems. We enable all options, set AA to 2x and AF to 8x, and play back a custom timedemo of a complete game session from the Runway chapter within the Dead Air campaign.
This title also favors the Intel platforms. When comparing the Q9550 to the Phenom II 940 at 1680x1050 it holds a 7% average frame rate advantage in single card mode, 5% in Crossfire, and 20% in the overclocked settings even though the Q9550 only has a 7% clock speed advantage. Minimum frame rates for the Phenom II remain very competitive against the Q9550 until the processors are overclocked, but a 101fps minimum is still outstanding. The i7 continues to dominate the other two solutions in benchmark results.
Adding a second card for CrossFire operation improves average frame rates by 15% and minimum frame rates by 18% for the Phenom II. The Intel Q9550 has an improvement of 13% in average frame rates and 30% in minimum frame rates. The Core i7 average frame rates improve by 16% and minimum rates increase 31%. Overclocking our processors resulted in an 17%~34% average improvement in average frame rates with the Core i7 benefiting the most.
No surprises here; the 1920x1200 results follow the pattern set at 1680x1050. All three solutions bunch together in the single card results and then spread out as we introduce CrossFire and overclocking into our equation. The Q9550 holds a 10% advantage over the Phenom II in CrossFire and 26% when overclocked. Minimum frame rates continue to be very good for the Phenom II in single card and CrossFire operation.
The Q9550 scores slightly better than the i7 in the single card and CrossFire mode as its 6% advantage in clock speeds (or perhaps the larger L2 cache) comes into play as we start to become more GPU limited at this resolution. The Phenom II has a 6% clock speed advantage over the Q9550 and a 12% advantage over the i7 that leads us to believe platform efficiency is a problem or the game engine optimizations favor Intel. We believe it is a combination of both.
Adding a second card for CrossFire operation improves average frame rates by 13% and minimum frame rates by 42% for the Phenom II. The Intel Q9550 has an improvement of 24% in average frame rates and 40% in minimum frame rates. The Core i7 average frame rates improve by 24% and minimum rates increase 48%. Overclocking our processors resulted in a 16%~34% average improvement in average frame rates with the Core i7 benefiting the greatest.
Our game play experiences revealed no differences between the three platforms. Although the frame rates were lower with the Phenom II, it just did not matter in this game as minimum frame rates were at 60fps or higher in our tests.
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megabuster - Monday, February 2, 2009 - link
If it's not too troublesome next time please include a few pictures of your hardware set up. :)none12345 - Monday, February 2, 2009 - link
There are errors in the benchmark charts on page 9....and maybe other pages..In the first chart you have the overclocked 9550 CF at the top of the chart, yet if you look at the min and max frame rates it is NOT the top performer, the core i7 beats it with 5 more min frames and 12 more max frames. The overclocked phenom ii cf shoudl also beat it with 11 higher min frames tho 13 less max frames.
In the second chart, the clear winer by the min/max frames is the overclocked phenom ii CF, it had a 9 higher min fps and 6 higher max fps yet its rated lower then the core i7. It had 21 more min fps yet only 2 less max fps then the 9550 but was ranked way lower.
Your score or min/max numbers are fubar...something is really wrong with those charts.
Maybe some of the other charts are messed up too, but this page stood out like a sore thumb.
Gary Key - Monday, February 2, 2009 - link
The charts are sorted by Average Frame Rates, unfortunately our engine does not allow multiple sorts on values. Let me see if I can do something different in the SLI article with an Excel chart, or I might just separate all the values into individual charts..7Enigma - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
Gary, Let me just throw my opinion in to keep it sorted by average frame rates.That is probably the most important data point (next to possibly minimum) and so is a good way of ranking. I will thank you again and ask that all future reviews use your format of showing all 3 data points as it is very important in determining the better card for a specific game at a specific resolution/detail setting.
balancedthinking - Monday, February 2, 2009 - link
The Phenom II massively gains gaming performance with an overclocked Nortbridge because it directly boosts the cache performance.Reviews like the one from the german site p3d showed an increase in gaming performance worth 300-500mhz core frequency for an overclock of only 400 mhz NB frequenzy!
The NB runs stock @ only 1800 mhz. Good overclocks are in the range of 2600 - 2800mhz. Imagine the performance that is missing in the OC results from anand!
That is why the Q9550 can pull ahead when overclocked, because due to architecture, the cache gets overclocked too wenn you raise the reference clock.
The Phenom II 940 offers great potential when tweaking the NB clock but you have to do it manually in contrast to Q9550!
So please Anand, redo the Phenom II 940 OC tests with the Northbridge frequency maxed out. Only that would be a fair comparison.
Gary Key - Monday, February 2, 2009 - link
The NB frequency is at 2486MHz in these tests. I have it listed on page two now. I could not go higher and maintain this clock speed in Vista 64. Raising the NB speed to 2712 meant lowering CPU speed to 3842MHz. I test both values and our 3955/2486 combo performed the best.Kiijibari - Monday, February 2, 2009 - link
Perfect :)Thx a lot.
Kiijibari - Monday, February 2, 2009 - link
I agree, an info concerning the NB clock of the Phenom2 is missing.@anandtech: Please add it.
cheers
Kiiji
Kiijibari - Monday, February 2, 2009 - link
From the article:"(17.5x226, DDR2-1205, 5-5-5-18)"
That means, that the NB was clocked with 2034 MHz, if nobody changed the default multiplier 9
CPUGuy - Monday, February 2, 2009 - link
balancedthinking,Thanks for providing this tidbit of information regarding how cache is overclocked on the Intel vs AMD CPUS. If this review is based on what you said then it should be amended for re-testing.