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
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:
The Phenom II 900 and 800 series are once again competitive with the equivalent Intel offerings. Since we're dealing with a well threaded workload, the Phenom II X3 720 manages to inch ahead of its Core 2 Duo competitors.
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.
Taxing only a single core all you can rely on is frequency, hence the E7500 being at the top of the charts. But we are in the multi-core era, so let's look at the multi-threaded results:
AMD does very well in the multi-threaded Cinebench test thanks to its architectu, only the fastest Core 2s and of course Core i7 are able to outperform the Phenom II. The triple core 720 has a clear advantage over its dual core competitors here.
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.
AMD continues to do quite well in POV-ray. The 900, 800 and 700 series are all competitive.
PAR2 Multithreaded Archive Recovery Performance
Par2 is an application used for reconstructing downloaded archives. It can generate parity data from a given archive and later use it to recover the archive
Chuchusoft took the source code of par2cmdline 0.4 and parallelized it using Intel’s Threading Building Blocks 2.1. The result is a version of par2cmdline that can spawn multiple threads to repair par2 archives. For this test we took a 708MB archive, corrupted nearly 60MB of it, and used the multithreaded par2cmdline to recover it. The scores reported are the repair and recover time in seconds.
The more cores the merrier; AMD does very well in our par2 test, especially down at the X3 720 level. Nothing can touch the 8-threads of madness that is Core i7 however, but today we're talking about much lower price points.
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7Enigma - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
Ditto the power consumption at OC'd levels. I always get annoyed to see these fantastic OC results but then fail to see whether we've doubled the power consumption. It would certainly allow us to see a potential benefit if one or the other uses significantly less power under OC load conditions.Gary Key - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
We will have power consumption and temps up tomorrow for the OC results along with a few benchmarks. It was difficult to get stable (true) volt readings with the X4 810 installed, so I spent my weekend with the DMM on the boards.Kaleid - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
Great! Possible to also add difference with non-overclocked and overclocked power consumption at idle?7Enigma - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
At the wall (total system) or just for the CPU? Do you mean the total system power was fluctuating with the 810? That seems really really wierd.Gary Key - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
The power was fluctuating on the board at the Core VID side. I should have a BIOS spin tonight to fix it. The 720 was perfect but the 810 had a few problems that have been identified now.7Enigma - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
*weird, please give us an edit function.OCedHrt - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
Interestingly, the 810 vs 910, there is no real performance difference outside the margin of error. In some cases, the 810 is faster and in some, the 910 takes the lead. Something I noticed though is that the 810 is faster than the 910 at more times, and faster by a larger amount (~3% when it is faster) as well. Seems like the reduced cache does not actually hamper performance.Moorbo - Friday, April 24, 2009 - link
For most applications it seems you're correct that the smaller cache makes little difference. However if you look at the gaming performance the 2MB/core L3 cache of the 720 and 710 clearly makes a big difference despite their slower clock and lack of an additional core. What would the numbers look like with only two cores and 3MB/core and a higher clock?johnsonx - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
indeed, the 710 is also often faster than the 910, but usually slower than the 810.I'm a bit surprised we the readers have to thumb through all the benchmark charts to see the 710/810/910 comparison. 3 Phenom II's at the same speed, one 'standard', one with less cache and one with a missing core; that is something AT should have dedicated a page to.
stmok - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
Yeah, I noticed that as well. It looks like 4MB L3 cache is sufficient with Phenom II. (Any less, it'll start hurting...Any more, you're just wasting silicon space).