AMD's Phenom X3 8000 Series: Fighting Two Cores with Three?

3D Rendering Performance

3dsmax r9

Our benchmark, as always, is the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 test but for the purpose of this article we only run the CPU rendering tests and not the GPU tests.

The results are reported as render times in seconds and the final CPU composite score is a weighted geometric mean of all of the test scores.

We've started testing with Windows Vista Service Pack 1, which for some reason really penalizes Intel in our 3dsmax benchmark. The CBALLS2 benchmark (a part of the SPECapc test) runs significantly slower on Intel platforms than it used to, resulting in a far more competitive landscape under 3dsmax.

Thanks to its on-die memory controller, the Phenom X3 is able to remain competitive at lower clock speeds than Intel but the problem is that it's not quite competitive enough. The Core 2 Duo E8400 and Phenom X3 8750 are similarly priced and perform virtually identically here, but the E8400 only has two cores vs. three in the Phenom thanks to a significant clock frequency disparity (3.0GHz vs. 2.4GHz).

Cinebench R10

A benchmarking favorite, Cinebench R10 is designed to give us an indication of performance in the Cinema 4D rendering application.

Competing within AMD, the Phenom X3 8650 is around 12% faster than the Athlon X2 6000+, and the 8450 almost 9% faster than the equivalently priced Athlon X2 5600+. The problem is that both chips are about the speed of Intel's Core 2 Duo E7200 and not even the fastest X3 8750 can outperform the Core 2 Duo E6850.

AMD continues to offer a reasonable upgrade to Socket-AM2 motherboard owners who are lucky enough to be on AMD's compatibility list, but falls short of being anything but an mild alternative to Intel at this point.

POV-Ray 3.7 Beta 24

POV-Ray is a popular raytracer, also available with a built in benchmark. We used the 3.7 beta which has SMP support and ran the built in multithreaded benchmark.