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
3dsmax 9 - SPECapc 3dsmax CPU Rendering Test
Today's desktop processors are more than fast enough to do professional level 3D rendering at home. To look at performance under 3dsmax we ran the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 benchmark (only the CPU rendering tests) under 3dsmax 9 SP1. The results reported are the rendering composite scores:
Performance under 3dsmax has the E5300 and E5200 at a significant advantage over the Athlon X2 7850. The E5300 is 14% quicker than the X2.
Cinebench R10
Created by the Cinema 4D folks we have Cinebench, a popular 3D rendering benchmark that gives us both single and multi-threaded 3D rendering results.
Cinebench performance ends up being a wash between the two parts, performance in both single and multithreaded versions of the test are virtually identical.
POV-Ray 3.73 beta 23 Ray Tracing Performance
POV-Ray is a popular, open-source raytracing application that also doubles as a great tool to measure CPU floating point performance.
I ran the SMP benchmark in beta 23 of POV-Ray 3.73. The numbers reported are the final score in pixels per second.
POV-Ray shows a nearly 16% performance advantage for Intel’s architecture over the Athlon X2.
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.
The performance advantage extends to over 20% under Blender. It looks like for video encoding or 3D rendering tasks, the Pentium E5300 is a much better option than the Athlon X2 7850.
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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.