The Phenom II X4 810 & X3 720: AMD Gets DDR3 But Doesn't Need It
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 9, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Blender 2.48a
Blender is an open source 3D modeling application. Our benchmark here simply times how long it takes to render a character that comes with the application.
While AMD is competitive in many applications, some do favor Intel's architectures; Blender is one of them. Only the Phenom II 700 series is competitive thanks to its triple-core advantage.
Microsoft Excel 2007
Excel can be a very powerful mathematical tool. In this benchmark we're running a Monte Carlo simulation on a very large spreadsheet of stock pricing data.
Sony Vegas Pro 8: Blu-ray Disc Creation
Although technically a test simulating the creation of a Blu-ray disc, the majority of the time in our Sony Vegas Pro benchmark is spend encoding the 25Mbps MPEG-2 video stream and not actually creating the Blu-ray disc itself.
AMD is very competitive here, outperforming all of the equivalently priced Intel CPUs. The clock speed and cache advantage of the Phenom II X3 720 is enough to even outpace the Core 2 Quad Q8200.
Sorenson Squeeze: FLV Creation
Another video related benchmark, we're using Sorenson Squeeze to convert regular videos into Flash videos for use on websites.
The performance breakdown is more of what we've been seeing here tonight.
WinRAR - Archive Creation
Our WinRAR test simply takes 300MB of files and compresses them into a single RAR archive using the application's default settings. We're not doing anything exotic here, just looking at the impact of CPU performance on creating an archive:
The entire Phenom II lineup ends up performing very similarly, largely because there are IO limitations at work here despite our use of an SSD. Cache size matters as Intel's smaller cache quad-core chips don't do nearly as well as the 12MB behemoths.
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just4U - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
I think you were a bit optimistic in your prediction that DDR3 will be at price parity with DDR2 by years end but otherwise a good review.I do have a question tho as I am not 100% sure on it. The cpu's that were launched in January (920/40). Are they also compatable with DDR3 boards? Or just these new cpu's?
faxon - Friday, May 1, 2009 - link
really? because right now newegg is selling a 2x2GB kit of Gskill cas9 1600 for $59, and the like kit of DDR2 cas5 is only $56. all we need now is for latency on the ram to drop at the same low voltages seen on i7 kits and i would call that price parity, not that you will even really notice the latency difference except in synthetic benchmarks anymoreDrMrLordX - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
To the best of my knowledge, AM2 and AM2+ Phenom/Phenom IIs will not support DDR3. Their memory controllers just can't hack it.hyc - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
How so? Barcelona/Phenom-I already had the dual memory controllers, they were just never enabled on any motherboards.Targon - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
For DDR3 support you need a DDR3 supporting CPU. From the sound of it, the processors are the socket AM3 type, meaning they will work in both socket AM2+ and socket AM3 motherboards. If a processor is for socket AM2/AM2+, it will NOT work in a DDR3 motherboard.The way it works is simple, the DDR3 versions of the processor have both DDR2 and DDR3 memory controllers, so will work with either type of memory. The DDR2 processors(X4 940 and 920) only have a DDR2 memory controller(it is dual channel, but that isn't the same as supporting both memory types), so will only work in a socket AM2 or AM2+ motherboard.
The X4 945 and 925(I think) will be the DDR3 supporting versions of the current chips.
Again, you can NOT put a socket AM2+ chip in a DDR3 board, it won't work(pin is blocked in the socket to avoid frying the chip). Even if you could put the chip in a DDR3 board, without the DDR3 memory controller on the CPU, it just would not work.
grb1212 - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - link
your not totally right if u have a am2/am2+/am3 compatible board and it uses ddr3 if u use a ddr2 compatible processor ddr3 will work with a ddr2 processor but it will act like ddr2 memory as far ass performanceTheFace - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
This may help.http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/socket-am3-phe...">http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/socket-am3-phe...
The chips released today seem to be the only ones that work in AM3. But the chips released today will also work in AM2/AM2+. It's just, as has been stated repeatedly, the chips designed for AM2/AM2+ won't work in AM3.