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
SYSMark 2007 Performance
Our journey starts with SYSMark 2007, the only all-encompassing performance suite in our review today. The idea here is simple: one benchmark to indicate the overall performance of your machine.
SYSMark is a great tool for showing off the fact that most applications are still not very well threaded and can't take advantage of more than two cores. Obviously if you're buying for the future then you'd want more cores, but today most users won't see a real benefit. The proof is in the pudding: look at the Phenom II X3 720 vs. the Phenom II X4 910 - the two offer identical performance. Sure the X4 910 has a larger L3 cache and the X3 720 has a faster clock speed, but the fourth core offers no real performance advantage.
Against to its Intel competition, the Phenom II X3 720 falls short of the Core 2 Duo E7500 and the E8400.
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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.