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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hyc - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
I was looking for the test that justified the "DDR3 not worth it" conclusion, but didn't see it.Where did you show the results of testing the X4 910 against the X4 940, with CPU and NB clocks set identically? If you didn't test this, then how can you make any conclusion about DDR2 vs DDR3 performance on Phenom II? If I missed it, sorry for being blind.
7Enigma - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
I'm hoping since this just went up they forgot to include a couple pages. If not, hopefully they are retesting ASAP to include data....jchan2 - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
i'm intersted in seeing the benchmarks myself.if it's true that DDR2 vs DDR3 doesn't make much difference in performance, then what's the purpose of getting DD3?
TheFace - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
So that when the prices DO drop later this year, they aren't caught with their pants down playing catch up on the memory compatibility front. Also, when Joe Schmoe runs to Worst Buy to replace the computer that he got 5 years ago, with a new $600 model, he can look on the box and see DDR3 which MUST be faster than DDR2.It's a selling point. In retail, ANYTHING is a selling point as long as there is a disparity in knowledge held by the parties involved.
Targon - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
Compatibility. When Intel made the jump to DDR2, AMD waited until the prices came down on the memory. If there is no performance advantage, then the only reason to change memory types is for price reasons.For large OEMs like Dell, HP, and Gateway, it is more cost effective if all systems use the same type of memory. At this point though, since there is a price premium for DDR3 memory, just having DDR3 support on the CPU would not make an OEM add more AMD based machines to their list of systems sold.
Gary Key - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
We are still working on the comparison, but all of the initial numbers pointed to a tie between DDR3 and DDR2 in our results so far. The BIOS releases for the AM3 boards are just now coming up to speed. I had planned on significantly more information in the overclocking section but we just received a new BIOS for the 790FX boards that allow DDR3 clocking above 1600 or so.However, at like core clock speeds, DDR2-1175 C5 is just as fast as DDR3-1600 C7 in most of the benchmarks at this point. We are running tests now at the lower end of the spectrum to show 800/1066 DDR2 vs 1066/1333 DDR3. Those results still show little if any differences.
thepiratebay - Wednesday, February 25, 2009 - link
Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66GHzin ur upper test as u can seee 2.8?????
Enoc - Tuesday, February 10, 2009 - link
DDR3 is not the problem, Deneb is bottlenecked on NB-L3 side... what it needs is NB at 2,800mhz+ with DDR3 1,600mhz+ for a good scaling...Denithor - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
"We are still working on the comparison"SO - why would you even reference DDR3 as being useless in your title if you aren't going to provide evidence to back up this comment?
Gary Key - Monday, February 9, 2009 - link
We are still working on it but all results so far point to that being the case right now. It is difficult to have meaningful results ready when receiving BIOS releases that actually stabilize a board just a few hours before going to print. ;)