Which phenom ii should i get

Thanks to OCZ for providing these units for our use in testing. NCIX now sells to U. Vertical refresh sync vsync was disabled. The tests and methods we employ are usually publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them. We figure the graph below is just complicated enough to weed out the lightweights and keep our readership from getting all big and unmanageable.

For instance, the 1MB block size ought to spill into the L3 cache on the Phenoms. Although our Core 2 test systems have relatively fast DDR3 memory, their memory bandwidth appears to be limited by their front-side bus speeds.

With integrated memory controllers, all of the Phenoms can transfer data from main memory faster, and the Phenom IIs make some nice gains over the original Phenom in this department. Of course, the Core i7 is even faster still thanks to its onboard triple-channel DDR3 memory controller. Not bad. Below are 3D graphs of memory access latencies at various block and step size for the Phenom II and some of its closer rivals. The Core 2 Q lacks an L3 cache, but has a larger L2 instead.

We measured Warhead performance using the FRAPS frame-rate recording tool and playing over the same second section of the game five times on each processor. This method has the advantage of simulating real gameplay quite closely, but it comes at the expense of precise repeatability. We believe five sample sessions are sufficient to get reasonably consistent results. This is, after all, a CPU test. Those of you looking for clock-for-clock comparison of CPU architectures might want to pay attention to how the Phenom II X4 , at 2.

Even the slowest Core i7 here, the , may be running at up to 3. After playing around with Far Cry 2 , I decided to test it a little bit differently by recording frame rates during the jeep ride sequence at the very beginning of the game.

I found that frame rates during this sequence were generally similar to those when running around elsewhere in the game, and after all, playing Far Cry 2 involves quite a bit of driving around. Since this sequence was repeatable, I just captured results from three second sessions. Can they keep this up? As you saw on the preceding page, I did manage to find a couple of CPU-limited games to use in testing.

The rest? Bots controlled by the CPU. I racked up frags like mad while capturing five second gameplay sessions for each processor. The Phenom II processors perform quite well in this game, as well, clearly outrunning their direct price competition. Then again, with these frame rates, any of these processors will run this game quite smoothly.

Next up is a test we picked up during a visit to Valve Software , the developers of the Half-Life games. They had been working to incorporate support for multi-core processors into their Source game engine, and they cooked up some benchmarks to demonstrate the benefits of multithreading.

This test runs a particle simulation inside of the Source engine. Most games today use particle systems to create effects like smoke, steam, and fire, but the realism and interactivity of those effects are limited by the available computing horsepower.

The two Phenom IIs come back to earth a little here, just trailing the Q and Q, respectively. This benchmark uses scripting to step through a series of tasks in common Windows applications and then produces an overall score for comparison. WorldBench also records individual results for its component application tests, allowing us to compare performance in each.

The Phenoms fall behind in Winzip, though. Not sure what to make of that one, other than to say that this performance was consistent for both Phenom II speed grades across multiple test runs. The Panorama Factory photo stitching The Panorama Factory handles an increasingly popular image processing task: joining together multiple images to create a wide-aspect panorama.

I asked it to join four pictures, each eight megapixels, into a glorious panorama of the interior of Damage Labs. The Phenom IIs recover with a respectable showing in our photo-stitching app. Below is a look at the individual operations required to create a panorama, if you care to see that sort of detail. Reinert H. Many of the individual functions that make up the test are multithreaded. This benchmark tests performance with one of the most popular H.

The results come in two parts, for the two passes the encoder makes through the video file. These scores come from the newer, faster version 0. In pass two, though, we have a pair of photo finishes between like-priced competitors. Windows Media Encoder is one of the few popular video encoding tools that uses four threads to take advantage of quad-core systems, and it comes in a bit version.

Both audio codecs have a variable bitrate peak of Kbps. Of course, multithreading works even better on multi-core processors. You can download a paper in Word format describing the programming effort. That is, the psycho-acoustic analysis happens one frame ahead of everything else, and its results are buffered for later use by the second thread.

We have results for two different bit versions of LAME MT from different compilers, one from Microsoft and one from Intel, doing two different types of encoding, variable bit rate and constant bit rate. The rest of our media encoding tests show us a seesaw battle between the Q and , and another between the Q and Remarkable how similarly these CPUs perform, given their sheer complexity and very different architectures.

This test runs with just a single thread and then with as many threads as CPU cores or threads, in CPUs with multiple hardware threads per core are available. Some of the beta bit executables have been quite a bit slower than the 3. All told, our suite of 3D rendering tests fails to break the stalemate between the Phenom IIs and their Core 2 Quad adversaries.

Overall, Folding Home should be a great example of real-world scientific computing. It then processes a sample work unit of each type. When either of those WUs are finished, the benchmark moves on to additional WU types, always keeping both cores occupied with some sort of calculation. Should the benchmark run out of new WUs to test, it simply processes another WU in order to prevent any of the cores from going idle as the others finish.

Once all four of the WU types have been tested, the benchmark averages the points per day among them. That points-per-day average is then multiplied by the number of cores on the CPU in order to estimate the total number of points per day that CPU might achieve. This may be a somewhat quirky method of estimating overall performance, but my sense is that it generally ought to work. I have included results for each of the individual WU types below, so you can see how the different CPUs perform on each.

This is beginning to feel like a reality TV show where the producers tip the scales to make the contest seem even. I swear, folks, we just run the tests and the results come out as they will. Our benchmarks sometimes come from unexpected places, and such is the case with this one. David Tabb is a friend of mine from high school and a long-time TR reader. In shotgun proteomics, researchers digest complex mixtures of proteins into peptides, separate them by liquid chromatography, and analyze them by tandem mass spectrometers.

This creates data sets containing tens of thousands of spectra that can be identified to peptide sequences drawn from the known genomes for most lab organisms. Recently, David Tabb and Matthew Chambers at Vanderbilt University developed MyriMatch , an algorithm that can exploit multiple cores and multiple computers for this matching.

Source code and binaries of MyriMatch are publicly available. In this test, tandem mass spectra from a Thermo LTQ mass spectrometer are identified to peptides generated from the proteins of S. The data set was provided by Andy Link at Vanderbilt University. MyriMatch uses threading to accelerate the handling of protein sequences. The database read into memory is separated into a number of jobs, typically the number of threads multiplied by When a thread finishes handling all proteins in the current job, it accepts another job from the queue.

This technique is intended to minimize synchronization overhead between threads and minimize CPU idle time. The most important news for us is that MyriMatch is a widely multithreaded real-world application that we can use with a relevant data set. I should mention that performance scaling in MyriMatch tends to be limited by several factors, including memory bandwidth, as David explains:. Inefficiencies in scaling occur from a variety of sources. First, each thread is comparing to a common collection of tandem mass spectra in memory.

Although most peptides will be compared to different spectra within the collection, sometimes multiple threads attempt to compare to the same spectra simultaneously, necessitating a mutex mechanism for each spectrum.

Second, the number of spectra in memory far exceeds the capacity of processor caches, and so the memory controller gets a fair workout during execution. The Phenom II X4 is 21 seconds slower than the Q with only one thread, but its performance scales better as the thread count ramps up. At four threads, the Phenom II is a few seconds faster. This benchmark has been available to the public for some time in single-threaded form, but Charles was kind enough to put together a multithreaded version of the benchmark for us with a larger data set.

He has also put a web page online with a downloadable version of the multithreaded benchmark, a description, and some results here. In this test, the application is basically doing analysis of airflow over an aircraft wing. I will step out of the way and let Charles explain the rest:. The CFD grid contains 1. The benchmark executable advances the Mach 0.

A benchmark score is reported as a CFD cycle frequency in Hertz. So the higher the score, the faster the computer. Charles tells me these CFD solvers are very floating-point intensive, but oftentimes limited primarily by memory bandwidth. He has modified the benchmark for us in order to enable control over the number of threads used. Our Extech power meter has the ability to log data, so we can capture power use over a span of time. We plugged the computer monitor into a separate outlet, though.

Clearly, the Phenom II has much lower idle power use than its 65nm predecessors. Man, is that ever close. The two systems idle at just about the same power level and complete the rendering task in nearly the same amount of time.

The Phenom II is a smidgen quicker. Offsetting considerations, perhaps, at least in part. Next, we can look at peak power draw by taking an average from the ten-second span from 15 to 25 seconds into our test period, during which the processors were rendering. Another way to gauge power efficiency is to look at total energy use over our time span. This method takes into account power use both during the render and during the idle time. We can express the result in terms of watt-seconds, also known as joules.

We can quantify efficiency even better by considering specifically the amount of energy used to render the scene. This method should account for both power use and, to some degree, performance, because shorter render times may lead to less energy consumption.

You may have already heard some of the hype about overclocking headroom in the Phenom II. And, given that the Phenom II X4 comes as a Black Edition with an unlocked multiplier, overclocking it could be incredibly easy. Also, AMD probably needs a little additional headroom in these chips to match the 45nm Core 2, which has long been an excellent overclocker. I was using a multithreaded version of Prime95 for stress testing, generally only testing for a few minutes at each speed grade during my initial attempts.

Getting the system to boot into Windows at 3. As you can see, I eventually settled on 3. I was close to 3. Perhaps with a little more tweaking this CPU could make it over the hump at 3. When overclocked to 3. The Phenom II proved to be faster in several of our gaming tests, but it was slower in some components of WorldBench, including WinZip and Photoshop, which lowered its overall score a bit. And obviously, the Core i7 is yet another step beyond the Core 2. And since Phenom is based heavily on 9 year old Athlon cores, I definitely have little faith in it going anywhere at this point.

And finally, Phenom 2 is a slightly upgraded version of a year old CPU. Also, x for example does have Phenom optimizations. Just go read through the changelog sometime. C2 dominated the benchmarks from day 1, all this crap about how software needs to be tuned for AMD products is exactly the same crap mac people said for all the years G4 and G5 were getting spanked by Intel and AMD.

You are in denial. They are typically somewhat close in price to their LGA counterparts. You could just make the jump to Core i7. Good to see AMD doing business with Dell.

Me too. AM2 is soon to be dead too though. I think most people have forgotten a simple fact in the new PII benchmarks. No more upgrades period. Maybe waiting for the i5 is a wiser option. After that you can upgrade the processor again. No need for quad core space heaters yet. The low amount of L2 cache hurts the Q and Q, especially when you attempt to overclock them. Q already has been discontinued and get to be hard to acquire outside of third-party channels. Winning quite a number of gaming benchmarks, while being the less expensive total platform IS a compelling solution.

Does AMD have the cache right now? And where exactly is the victory here? No, not really. Currently have a low profile gtx with phenom ii x3 b CPUs 9 Nov 19, Post thread.

Graphics Cards. Question Can i still run the game if my GPU isn't enough for minimum requirements? Started by kwikman Today at PM Replies: 8. Question Super giving me worse frames than a ? Started by Small-Change Oct 7, Replies: Question Inconsistent mouse lag for several years even after changing computers, monitors, and peripherals Started by ro12dq-e Today at AM Replies: Windows News Comments. Latest posts. Question Toshiba Disk Shift values - are they accurate and do they matter?

Latest: fzabkar A moment ago. Latest: rounakr94 1 minute ago. Latest: drea. Apps and Software. Question She was running so well Moderators online. Tom's Hardware is part of Future plc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Visit our corporate site. All rights reserved. England and Wales company registration number Question am3 build fx vs phenom. Sep 9, Jun 16, Jun 6, Jan 20, Jan 9, Jan 2, Unlocked multiplier. Multimedia performance suffers compared to Intel.

WPrime 2. Intel Core 2 Q Intel Core 2 Q 1m17s. Intel Core 2 Q 2m18s. WinRAR 3. Intel Core 2 Q 4m55s. Intel Core 2 Q CB. Intel Core 2 Q 1. Intel Core 2 Q Max: 73fps. Avg: 56fps. Min: 43fps.