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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thepiratebay - Wednesday, February 25, 2009 - link
Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66GHz not 2.8 you put def procer in test and if overclockd you write oc...I am sure that intel is better but no so way better
and in my opinion in the last 2 years you fav intel and nvidia more for what i am sure u have good reasons.Why i think so becas... you point just the bad sides of amd and the good of the other side on price preformance cpu mainbord you name it the diff between amd intel is tiny or amd is better.And another thing i live and work in germany and from 1000 pepole maybe 1 has core i7 pepole dont have money for maybe litle better cpu wich by the way has no software or appp maybe 5 or 10 and you compare that with ddr 2 platform from amd come on now
thepiratebay - Wednesday, February 25, 2009 - link
Do some math with me:* 790FX/GX motherboard 125 USD
* Phenom II X3 720 BE 145 USD
* 2x2GB DDR2 800 MHz 50 USD
* Radeon HD 4850 150 USD
* Power supply 550 Watt 55 USD
* Chassis 50 USD
* 500 GB HDD 55 USD
Grand total: 630,- USD
swaaye - Thursday, February 12, 2009 - link
Phenom II does not fix XP's performance problems with Phenom's CnQ, btw. Huge performance loss. Saw it first hand.goinginstyle - Friday, February 13, 2009 - link
It is fixed on Vista and Windows 7 though... also, you need to load the new CnQ driver in XP, if you do, it works there also.swaaye - Saturday, February 14, 2009 - link
The "new" XP driver appears to be from 2007.otheos - Thursday, February 12, 2009 - link
I use a 690G based gigabyte motherboard. Gigabyte just posted new BIOS to support these AM3 CPUs (along with AM2 and AM2+) and have been wondering what would be the performance hit from using an older motherboard with slower HT speed?A nice review would compare the same AM3 (plus some AM2+) Phenoms on AM2, AM2+ and AM3 (wiht DDR3 Ram). This way people who only want to upgrade their CPU would know what to expect.
After all that's what AMD have in mind for their backward compatibility of these chips.
Thanks.
swaaye - Thursday, February 12, 2009 - link
HT is what connects the processor to the rest of the system. High HT speed seems to be most important for multiprocessor servers and systems that use an IGP. The RAM is directly connected to the CPU, so no bottleneck there. So I doubt you'll see any tangible performance loss.corsa - Thursday, February 12, 2009 - link
The clear cut recommendation is Phenom ..becuase its smoother :)Mr Roboto - Wednesday, February 11, 2009 - link
Unreal. I mean look at where the now ancient Q6600 still ranks compared to AMD's latest and greatest. *sigh*I don't want an Intel monopoly. I don't want the only choices to be Intel and Microsoft. That's not a world I wanna live in! *Loads pistol*
loimlo - Wednesday, February 11, 2009 - link
Thanks for such an informative review!Though 790FX/790GX is very good, I think 780G with SB700 would be a better combination for X3 720/710 considering its lower price. I've to admit I may take this upgrade path. Anyway, thanks for your hard work.