|
|
AMD Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition Review
[Abstract]
AMD's Incremental Update With a volley of its new Clarkdale Core i3/i5 processors, Intel has fired the first shots of 2010. It just so happens that with its cheapest Core i3 desktop processors ...
[Content] PCDigitalMobileGame
Test Setup
Like our review of the AMD Athlon II X4, it's difficult getting the modern comparisons for the Phenom II X2 555 BE. Intel has largely left the lower priced segments to its older Core 2 processors and recently the Clarkdale based Pentium G9650. Since we don't exactly have some of these processors lying around in our lab, we had to make do with the ones we tested for the Athlon II X4 review, namely the Core 2 Quad Q8200 (US$160) and the Pentium Dual-Core E6500 (US$87). Of course, we'll also compare the Phenom II X2 555 BE with the Athlon II X4 630 and 620. With the release of the Athlon II X4 635, the Athlon II X4 630 has been reduced in price to US$99, the same price as the Phenom II X2 555 BE, so that makes for an interesting comparison point too.
By downclocking the Phenom II X2 555 BE, we have obtained the results of the Phenom II X2 550 BE for reference. Two systems (AMD and Intel), with similar amount of memory and the same graphics card and hard drive are used to keep the results comparable in our benchmarks. Both were running Windows XP SP2. The full system configurations are:
AMD System Test Configuration
- CPU - Phenom II X2 555 BE, 550 BE; Athlon II X2 630, 620
- MSI 790FX-GD70 (AMD 790FX + SB750)
- 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1333 (7-7-7-20)
- Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 200GB SATA hard drive (one single NTFS partition)
- Zotac GeForce GTX 260 (ForceWare 178.24)
- Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2
Intel System Test Configuration
- CPU - Core 2 Quad Q8200, Pentium Dual-Core E6500
- ASUS P5E3 Deluxe (Intel X38 Express chipset)
- 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1333 memory modules (CAS 7-7-7-20)
- Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 200GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
- Zotac GeForce GTX 260 (ForceWare 178.24)
- Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2
- Intel INF 8.3.1.1009 and Matrix Storage Manager 7.8.0.1012
Benchmarks
The following benchmarks were used in this review:
- BAPCo SYSmark 2007 Preview (ver 1.05)
- SPECCPU 2000 v1.3
- Futuremark PCMark 2005 Pro
- Lightwave 3D 7.5
- 3ds Max8 (SP2)
- Cinebench 10
- Futuremark 3DMark06 v1.1
- AquaMark3
- World in Conflict v1.05
- Crysis v1.1
|
|
|
