Performance
As I mentioned, the X4 9350e is not going to be a stellar performer in comparison to AMD’s other Phenom offerings, nor is it going to compete with Intel’s Q6600. Nonetheless, I decided to run a few benchmarks to judge its relative performance, and to see where it fits in.
Cinebench R10 is produced by Maxon. It is based on their Cinema 4D animation application and is very CPU intensive. It allows benchmarks to be conducted using one, or all available CPU cores. Additional cores can provide very large improvements in Cinebench scores.
Two tests were conducted using Cinebench. The first is the rendering test utilizing only a single core. The second uses all available cores.
The relatively low 2GHz clock certainly hampers the performance of a single core. This is not a surprise given its clock speed and it fits in exactly where I would expect it to in comparison to AMD’s X3 processors.
With all four cores utilized, we see a very different picture. The X4 9350e is able to best not only the X3 8750 at a 400MHz lower clock, but also outperforms Intel’s 3GHz E8400 dual core. Intel’s Q6600 still leads the pack by a very healthy margin.
PCMark Vantage is a new Vista-only benchmark suite from Futuremark. It is multi-core aware and provides a variety of different tests that simulate real-world activities. I’ll be using the ‘Memories’ digital photo manipulation test as well as the ‘TV and Movies’ test. Both are very CPU intensive. Since the X4 9350e is a likely candidate to find its way into HTPCs, the ‘TV and Movies’ test should be of particular interest.
The X4 9350e performs about at par with the 400MHz faster X3 8750, clearly benefiting from the extra core. This benchmark appears to favor Intel’s Core architecture.
In the ‘TV and Movies’ test, the X4 9350e does very well, and trails the Q6600 only slightly. It managed to outperform both the X3 8750 and Intel E8400.
Sisoft Sandra is a great synthetic benchmark suite that allows testing of numerous system components. I’ll be using the CPU arithmetic benchmark. Although it is really not a good indication of ‘real world’ performance, it does provide a good measure of raw CPU number crunching ability.
We’re using version 14.20, which is multi-core aware and triple-core friendly.
With four cores available, the 9350e has quite a bit of processing power under the hood. Sandra has no issue putting all of them to use and the 9350e comes out ahead of all of the triple and dual core processors. Again, the Q6600 has proved to be an incredibly efficient processor and leads by quite a bit.
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