AMD's Phenom X3 8000 Series: Fighting Two Cores with Three?
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 23, 2008 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Gaming Performance
Supreme Commander
Supreme Commander is a popular RTS (Real Time Strategy) title that can be very CPU dependent. Our benchmark involves playing back, as fast as possible, a 4-person match and recording the simulation time for the replay in seconds.
We ran Supreme Commander at 1920 x 1200 with High fidelity presets, v-sync was disabled.
None of the AMD CPUs manage to do well here at all and despite Supreme Commander's ability to utilize more than two cores, the added benefit is small enough that triple-core doesn't really do much at all. Here we have another example of the Phenom X3 8450 performing on-par with the similarly priced Athlon X2s.
Crysis
The most demanding FPS on the market right now is Crysis, and we couldn't resist using it as a benchmark. We ran at 1024 x 768 with Medium Quality defaults and used the game's built in CPU benchmark.
Clock speed is king under Crysis and thus the fastest AMD processor is the old 90nm Athlon X2 6000+ running at 3.0GHz, unfortunately not even it is really fast enough to be competitive here. Armed with low clock speeds, Phenom need not apply.
Half Life 2 Episode Two
Half Life 2 continues the trend: the architectural enhancements of Phenom aren't enough to overcome its horrendously low clock speeds, the fastest AMD chip here is the aging Athlon X2.
Unreal Tournament 3
We finally see some balance in Unreal Tournament 3 thanks to some clever multi-threaded development. Here we see that modern code can run faster on Phenom than the Athlon X2, despite being at a significant clock speed disadvantage. Even compared to Intel, AMD manages to remain reasonably competitive but never quite superior.
Valve Map Compilation
Valve supplied us with their VRAD map compilation tool to measure the performance of compiling Source engine maps.
Valve's VRAD map compilation test scales very well with multiple cores and thus the Phenom X3 is pretty competitive here. AMD doesn't have the clock speed to compete against Intel's 3.0GHz E8400, so it must compete with more cores and it's exactly what we see here. The X3 8750 only runs at 2.4GHz but manages to perform on par with the 3.0GHz Core 2 Duo E8400 thanks to having that third core, which in this case is well utilized.
Unfortunately the map compilation test highlights a major issue with the triple-core strategy. Just as AMD is banking on not many applications needing quad-core, most applications don't need tri-core either and if you're running an application that doesn't benefit from three cores then the Phenom X3 behaves like a dual-core chip with a low clock speed. It's only in these well-threaded applications that triple-core can really shine, and they unfortunately aren't always the most common.
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Locutus465 - Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - link
I just upgraded my system to the following last night (running vista ultimate ed. 64bit).AMD Phenom 9850be (at stock speed for now, with packaged heatsink).
4GB OCz DDR2 800 memory (at stock speed)
ASUS M3A32-MVP Deluxe / WiFi-AP AMD 790FX
DIAMOND Viper Radeon HD 3870
Soundblaster x-fi Fatal1ty
The rest of my system stayed the same, primary hdd = WD Caviar SATA 7200RPM, secondary = Segate SATA 7200RPM, page file running off of secondary disc rather than system disc etc.
I can tell you right now that the all AMD platform is very strong. As my primary display I have a 19" LCD running 1280x1024 and I run all games with all graphics options set to max and never get below 70FPS on any game I know how to pull the FPS for. I'm able to run crysis very smoothly at the same resolution with medium graphics settings, I have not yet tried cranking things up though. Additionally I've had to take some of my work home which delt with converting a 3GB pipe delimited file in to several smaller files then converting those into valid CSV files (using excel), on my new system this process was very quick. For your reference below is a list of every game I've tried on my system, they ALL play silky smooth.
Doom 3
Quake 4
Age of Empires III
F.E.A.R
Oblivion
Half Life 2
Half Life 2 EP1
WoW
*Crysis
*only game I don't have graphics/audio settings fully maxed on.
Since upgrading I've also taken to gaming on my 720P Toshi DLP using the DVI to HDMI converter packaged with my video card and audio running through my AVR via multi-channel analog inputs. All I have to say is damn is that fun!!!
Ensoph42 - Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - link
I don't understand why every review I've seen for the Phenoms use DDR2-800. I thought one of the perks was that you were supposed to use DDR2-1066 to get max performance. Someone explain this to me.niva - Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - link
I have a phenom 9600 with 8Gb of RAM, I had major issues getting the RAM to 1066 and remaining stable, simply stayed with 800 for stability reasons. Then again, I don't play games much so I'm not concerned about squeezing out an extra 1-5% performance for the sake of stability.Of course I didn't play with this too much, maybe I was doing something wrong but I've not found a good guide saying exactly what I need to set for the system to remain stable.
Ensoph42 - Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - link
I hear you. Although is it that your mem is rated at 800 and wont OC to 1066? Or rated for 1066 but just isn't stable period at that speed?However the GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-S2H, that is used in the review, has a memory standard of DDR2-1066. One of the selling points of the Phenom, I believed, was the memory controller supported DDR2-1066.
I found this link here that takes a look at performance differences. I havent given it a close read since it's late, and seems limited but:
http://www.digit-life.com/articles3/mainboard/ddr2...">http://www.digit-life.com/articles3/mainboard/ddr2...
perzy - Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - link
Well unless the software is as well written as Unreal engine 3 (Tim Sweeney is a god),in 95% of the programs avrege Joe use (including windows itself) there is very little advantage even going from singlecore to dualcore!Which brings me to my question: Whats really going on with the 'Heat wall' 'Frequenzy wall' or whatever you call it that Intel hit so hard in 2004(-ish) ? (remember the throttling superhot 3.8 GHz P4's ?)
What all users really need is higher frequenzy! Why arn't we getting it?
Clauzii - Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - link
The frequency wall can be considered like cooking the electrons off of the DIE-surface, which is not so good. High frequency=High heat. Now Youre thinking, "But IBM got 6GHz?". It's a different design philosophy: Simpler pipeline, faster frequency.Until ALL programs/OSes support multi-threaded programs, we are bound to single-threaded OR the pseudo Hyperthreading which can do SOME multithreading, depending on the Code & Data used.
If I've used a 8 GHz machine to write this on, I would still only be able to see the cursor rate one pr. sec.
What I think we need are (even more!) intelligent CPUs (GPUs). If a CPU or GPU knew approx. what kind of performance and usage of power a program needs, a more sofisticated power scheme could be possible??
Until then, All I know is that evolution goes forward. Not always fast, but forward :)
Nehemoth - Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - link
...(or give up 200MHz and get a quad-core X3 9550 at the same price)...Should be Quad-Core X4 no X3
MrBlastman - Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - link
I'd like to see them include the X2 6400 in the benchmarks as well. I see that they might be trying to get the pricing in line, but for an AMD user looking to upgrade, all I really am considering right now is a 6400, X3 or X4, nothing else.The UT 3 benchmarks shed some hope for the Phenoms as they show with a properly coded game, the X4's can remain competitive. I still wish to this day they'd release 3+ GHz phenoms :(
ImmortalZ - Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - link
Any MPEG4 AVC video encoded at Profile 4.1 or lower is fully accelerated by today's GPUs. Scene releases from the past few months confirm to this - and even with this, most of the older release are still compatible given you use the proper filters.ImmortalZ - Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - link
* By Profile I meant Level.