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Review: AMD brings 45nm process and Phenom to bear on dual-core CPUs

by Tarinder Sandhu on 2 June 2009, 00:00 3.6

Tags: AMD Athlon II X2 250, AMD (NYSE:AMD)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qash5

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Power-draw, and DDR2 1,066 vs. DDR2 800MHz comparison

HEXUS.power - idle-power reading
AMD Athlon X2 7750 BEAMD Athlon X2 7850 BEIntel Pentium Dual-Core E5200AMD Athlon X2 6000+AMD Athlon II X2 250
11196707677


HEXUS.power - under-load reading
AMD Athlon X2 7750 BEAMD Athlon X2 7850 BEIntel Pentium Dual-Core E5200AMD Athlon X2 6000+AMD Athlon II X2 250
175157100161125


Shipping with a 65W TDP, the idle and load power-draw numbers are much better than the other AMD chips, clearly, but, evaluated as a system, not as good as the Pentium Dual-Core's. 25W is telling in a small form-factor system.

DDR2 1,066 vs DDR2 800

Here we look at the performance benefits, if any, of running DDR2-1,066 (5-5-5-15-2T) memory against DDR2-800 (4-4-4-12-2T). Appreciating the latencies of DDR3 and based on prior performance results, DDR2-1,066 equates well to DDR3-1,333 (9-9-9-24-2T) in real-world benchmarks.

Processors Athlon X2 7850 BE DDR2-800 Athlon X2 7850 BE DDR2-1,066 Improvement of DDR2 1,066 vs DDR2 800 Athlon II X2 250 DDR2-800 Athlon II X2 250 DDR2-1,066 Improvement of DDR2 1,066 vs DDR2 800
ScienceMark (LIB) 60.23
56.66 5.92
51.76 48.34 6.6
SiSoft SANDRA (HIB) 7.7 8.06 4.68
8.92 9.81 10
HEXUS.PiFast (LIB) 42.33 41.61 1.7
38.94 38.23
1.8
DivX (LIB)
398 395 0.75
359 356 0.83
POV-Ray (HIB) 935.57 937.47 0.2
1179.35
1180.48 0.09

Take the three benchmarks - HEXUS.PiFast, DivX, and POV-Ray - and you see that there's practically no gain when moving to faster memory. DDR3 support is nice, sure, but it won't make a discernible difference to performance until, say, 2,000MHz-rated memory becomes cheap.