AMD's New Year Refresh: Athlon II X4 635, Phenom II X2 555, Athlon II X2 255 & Athlon II X3 440
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 25, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
3dsmax Performance
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:
The trend continues under 3dsmax. If you're running a highly threaded workload, there's no better value than the Athlon II X4 635 (although the Core i3 530 does come close). For the price of a dual-core CPU, the Athlon II X3 440 does the same thing.
With the Phenom II X2 555 BE performing similarly to the Pentium E6300, it'll be slower than the equivalently priced E6600. Surprisingly enough, AMD's new dual-core options aren't really that interesting in multithreaded workloads.
Cinebench R10 Performance
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.
And this is where the tradeoff becomes apparent The Athlon II X4 and X3 have the single threaded performance of a value dual-core Intel CPU. Crank up the thread count and the X3 and X4 do very well, but on more normal tasks they sub-optimal. These chips are for those who know exactly what they want.
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Eeqmcsq - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
I'm surprised AMD will release a 95W TDP X6. I hope the clock speed sacrifice isn't too bad on those.AmdInside - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Dumb question but none of these processors will work on older AM2 plus motherboards?Taft12 - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 - link
Pardon the yelling, but this is the only answer that matters:SEE THE SUPPORTED CPU LIST ON YOUR MOTHERBOARD'S SUPPORT PAGE
Many old boards don't get BIOS updates. Some do, but you won't know until you check.
nubie - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
It all depends on the board and manufacturer bios support.If your motherboard is recent (within 1-2 years old), or has a bios update from the manufacturer, then it will work.
Apparently some older boards don't have room on the bios chip to support AM2+ or AM3 processors as well as maintain backwards compatibility, it is a shame.
(I probably just have the rare board that isn't upgradeable.)
nubie - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Oops, you said AM2+ , but you spelled out the plusAM2+ is guaranteed to support AM3 processors.
Rand - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
I can't imagine why they wouldn't, their predecessors all did and there is nothing in the C3 stepping Phenom II's themselves that prevent it.AmdInside - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Well, I wasn't sure if these were AMD3 only or AM2/AM3 processors.Slaimus - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
There are no such thing as AM3-only processors. AM3 processors work in AM3 and AM2+ boards.All AM3 motherboards are AM3-only, and will not work with AM2 processors.
Rand - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
What is the stock VCore on the X4 910e?pattycake0147 - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
The link referencing hardware C1E on page 1 is broken.