AMD's Phenom X3 Processors

Mike D. 22 Apr, 2008 at 1:00am ET Article published in Tech

Gaming Performance

For gaming tests, I decided to use both new and not so new—Crysis and Half Life 2 Lost Coast. The ‘Assault’ demo was used for Crysis. I kept the resolution low at only 800×600 and all details to medium. Antialiasing was not enabled. Since this is a CPU review, I didn’t want to select a testing configuration that was completely GPU limited.

I used much higher settings in Half Life 2 Lost Coast. I used a resolution of 1280×1024, 8x AF and 4x AA. All other settings were set to high. Even with these settings, the test rig barely broke a sweat.

Surprisingly, there is very little performance difference between the AMD processors in Crysis.

Half Life 2 Lost Coast seems to prefer Intel’s architecture. The Phenom X3s do well compared to the Athlon 64 X2s considering that they are clocked 200-600MHz slower.

« Previous Next page »

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Comments

24 Apr 2008 ~ 3:03am Leonardo Thanks for the review, Mike.

Very interesting.
24 Apr 2008 ~ 10:20am GHoosdum It was great that you went the extra mile and cleared the "bad" core issue up with AMD. Go Mike!
24 Apr 2008 ~ 10:42am Winfrey These seem like a decent step up from the "X2" AMD processors. I'd personally like to see how they fold with an SMP client. Pretty encouraging for AMD, it's not beating intel soundly but the fab process definitely helps AMD to keep prices very competitive.

Learned lots thanks Mike!
24 Apr 2008 ~ 10:45am primesuspect Now I want one
24 Apr 2008 ~ 10:58am BuddyJ As do I.
30 Apr 2008 ~ 8:48pm Straight_Man I'll have to wait and see-- can't afford such a machine in the next six months-- but will be interested to see how they spread and how popular they are. I am running a 2.66 GHz Intel processor now that was state of the art 4 years ago, due to the fact that I have no current applications that can use multiple cores in the versions I have.
30 Apr 2008 ~ 8:50pm Leonardo

but the fab process definitely helps AMD to keep prices very competitive

No, AMD prices are de facto set by Intel. AMD has no choice in the matter.
1 May 2008 ~ 12:09am Winfrey

Leonardo wrote:

No, AMD prices are de facto set by Intel. AMD has no choice in the matter.

Correct but the fab process helps take some pressure off of being forced to set that low price, as in it is more affordable for AMD than if they didn't have their fab process.
1 May 2008 ~ 5:18am Your-Amish-Daddy Well. Three cores...I don't really know what to think of that... I remember when two cores meant two physical chips, back in the day of the Athlon MP's and dual P3 Slot rigs...MAN thsoe made powerful machines. But I wonder if XP will handle 3 cores...?
1 May 2008 ~ 6:18am Thrax XP can handle however many cores CPU manufacturers can fit into two physical sockets.
1 May 2008 ~ 10:25am BuddyJ core-rect