Test Setup
We'll be pairing the AMD Phenom X3 8750 Triple Core
Processor with the MSI K9A2 Platinum AMD 790FX Motherboard. A
Seagate Barracuda 1TB will handle the storage duties and a GeForce
8800GTX running ForceWare Release 169 for our video needs. Windows
Vista Ultimate 32-bit is the OS of choice, fully patched up to
the time of testing. 4 x 1024MB of Corsair's DDR2 was set to 800MHz,
configured in Dual Channel mode for testing. Keep in mind our
Vista version only supports 3GB.
The comparison CPUs will be an AMD Phenom X4 9600
and Intel E6600 (paired with a Gigabyte P35 DDR2 board). Both
processors were ran at stock speed. All the hardware peripherals
was identical. We chose the X4 for the sole reason that the price
point is very close to the X3 8750 we're looking at today. The
E6600 matches the clock speed of the X3 8750 (2.4GHz).
The software used is as follows:
PiFast
- A
good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is PiFast
version 4.2, by Xavier Gourdon. We used a computation of 10000000
digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory.
Note that lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.
TMPGEnc
2.54 - We used an Animatrix file, titled The
Second Renaissance Part 1, and a WAV created from VirtualDub.
The movie was then converted it into a DVD compliant MPEG-2 file
with a bitrate of 5000. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower
is better.
DVD
Shrink - We ripped the War of the Worlds bonus feature off
the disk at 100% and compressed the file from the hard drive to
70%. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.
Photoshop
CS2 Driver Heaven Test - Photoshop is perhaps the defacto
standard when it comes to photo editing tools. Given that it is
so popular, we incorporated DriverHeaven's latest test into our
review process. Lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars @ 640x480 and Crysis
@ 800x600 at LQ Settings - While higher resolutions tax the
video card, lower resolutions rely on CPU and subsystem speed.
Higher scores are better. We used Guru3D's Crysis benchmark tool
and the Checkpoint
timedemo for ETQW.
All benchmarks will be run a total of three times with the average
scores being displayed. Any system tweaks and ram timings were
configured to the best possible for each platform. Despite the
slight differences between the motherboards, we matched the tweaks
as close as possible. The drivers otherwise were identical.
PiFast
The X3 8750 slips behind the X4 9600 by a small
margin, but is is also behind the E6600.
TMPGEnc
Here we're seeing the power of multiple cores. The
X4 still finishes on top, but the X3 has a much better showing
relative to the comparison CPUs from the last test.
DVD Shrink
The results mirror the TMPGEnc test with the X3
8750 landing right in the middle.
Photoshop
The E6600 edges out the X3 8750 in Photoshop, and
both are well behind the X4.
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