AMD Athlon X2 7850 vs. Intel Pentium E5300: Choosing the Best $70 CPU

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.