AMD Athlon X2 7850 vs. Intel Pentium E5300: Choosing the Best $70 CPU
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 28, 2009 11:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
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.
PAR2 Multithreaded Archive Recovery Performance
Par2 is an application used for reconstructing downloaded archives. It can generate parity data from a given archive and later use it to recover the archive.
Chuchusoft took the source code of par2cmdline 0.4 and parallelized it using Intel’s Threading Building Blocks 2.1. The result is a version of par2cmdline that can spawn multiple threads to repair par2 archives. For this test we took a 708MB archive, corrupted nearly 60MB of it, and used the multithreaded par2cmdline to recover it. The scores reported are the repair and recover time in seconds.
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:
In its first major win of the day the Athlon X2 7850 is 20% faster than the E5300 in our WinRAR compression test.
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just4U - Tuesday, April 28, 2009 - link
I don't agree about intel being the clear choice, (enthusiast or otherwise)You have to factor in boards being used to. Chances are most that are looking for a bottom feeder budget build will be using integrated chipsets. The 780g/v brings so much more to the table over what we currently get from intel offerings..
That was a key sticking point for me.. and I think it really makes the choice a hard one to make unless your brand loyal, or a overclocker looking for a cheap cpu based around a competent setup.
nubie - Wednesday, April 29, 2009 - link
Depends on what you need, I went for a 650i motherboard with a single PCIe slot for an 8600GTS ( the 2ghz ram actually seems to help with the 128-bit bus). It was $40, and you can get that deal yourself.I doubt for $140 you can beat a 3.3-3.4 ghz core2 with an 8600GTS.
soydeedo - Tuesday, April 28, 2009 - link
Yeah, that's what I was thinking.Zaitsev - Tuesday, April 28, 2009 - link
I was hoping to see a few words on OCing as well. I mean, having two cores disabled should yield some more headroom than the quad core parts, right?Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, April 28, 2009 - link
I didn't have time to test overclocking for this article but if there's enough demand we can definitely look at how the two compare. The E5300 has a good amount of headroom thanks to its 45nm process, I'd expect the standings to remain the same if not widen in favor of Intel.Take care,
Anand
cpeter38 - Wednesday, April 29, 2009 - link
Please do OC the chip ...crimson117 - Tuesday, April 28, 2009 - link
OC results on these two budget CPUs would be great - but it'd be best if it were normalized somehow...1. Same price-class motherboards, around $100 or less to match the low-cost CPUs
2. Same exact ram modules
3. Same heatsink, or limit it to included stock heatsinks
, and re-run just a few choice benchmarks.
Would make for a great blog post :)
Viditor - Wednesday, April 29, 2009 - link
While you're at it, you should unlock the other 2 cores as well...http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/News/143621,amd-x2s-ar...">http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/News/143621,amd-x2s-ar...
johnsonx - Wednesday, April 29, 2009 - link
I've read dozens of articles and posts claiming that you can unlock the extra core(s) in the new X2's and X3's, and exactly ZERO telling how to actually do it. Is this some sort of urban legend?ssj4Gogeta - Tuesday, April 28, 2009 - link
Yes we'd definitely like to see OC results. I'm sure after OC'ing both chips to their max. gaming performance will be significantly better on the Intel part too.