[Solved] Athlon II X4 630 viable upgrade over Athlon 64 X2 6000?

In Tom's Athlon II x4 620 article, he states this is a viable upgrade for older AM2 boards with Athlon 64 X2 processors. Do you agree? I have a Gigabyte AM2 board currently running a Athlon 64 X2 6000, the one with 2 x 1MB cache which puts it near the top of the Athlon 64 X2 line. Unfortunately the mobo will not take a phenom II X4 940 or higher so I was wondering, should I spring for the Athlon II X4 630 for about $120, will I see a noticeable improvement in every day speed? Will the sacrifice of going from 3.0 to 2.8Mhz clock speed hurt in single thread applications or is the architecture of the Athlon II X4 superior enough to make up the difference. I'm running XP with 4 gigs of memory but soon will be running win 7 x64.

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what model board?

Reply to BadTrip

If your current system can support it (still waiting on BadTrip's question), then yes i'd say it would be a considerably faster processor and even in single threaded things you might find it faster too. What all do you do with your computer? If its just gaming and surfing the web....eh maybe dont upgrade but if you do things like CAD, 3d creation, photoshop, etc... it might be worth it

Reply to uncfan_2563

Use this Bench from Anandtech to compare the CPUs. Strictly in terms of gaming the 6000 performs about equal if you don't take overclocking into account, everything else the 630 pretty much crushes it.
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/def [...] =105&p2=28

If your motherboard supports the 630 or the 620 i'd say it was a good move.

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Message edited by dirtmountain on 10-31-2009 at 07:03:38 PM

Reply to dirtmountain

The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H and according to their web page it will support the 630 with the exception of reduced HT which I have been told is not a big deal if you are using a discreet video card which I am.

Reply to geepondy

Oh that's a neat comparison, thanks for the link. I didn't realize that feature was there at Anandtech.

dirtmountain wrote :

Use this Bench from Anandtech to compare the CPUs. Strictly in terms of gaming the 6000 performs about equal if you don't take overclocking into account, everything else the 630 pretty much crushes it.
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/def [...] =105&p2=28

If your motherboard supports the 630 or the 620 i'd say it was a good move.

Reply to geepondy

Hell yes!, do it!

Reply to reconviperone1

Under normal circumstances (a board that supports hypertransport 3.0) I would say do it; your board, however, only supports hypertransport 2.0, which runs at half the speed of 3.0. Considering this, the anandtech comparison is no longer valid as the 630 will not perform as well as it is shown there. In short, you will likely take a performance hit in games and singlethreaded apps, but if you do anything that utilizes more than 2 cores (cad, photoshop, etc.) you will see an increase in performance.

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Reply to pepperman

As I posted in another thread, the performance hit will be negligible, except in synthetic benchmarks.

Reply to BadTrip

i would not trust that anandtech procesor comparison ROFL http://www.anandtech.com/bench/def [...] p=79&p2=99

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Reply to Derbixrace

Derbixrace wrote :

i would not trust that anandtech procesor comparison ROFL http://www.anandtech.com/bench/def [...] p=79&p2=99

Why? It shows the core i7 at a few hundred percent better performance than the atom, which it is.

Reply to pepperman

I think you missed the "lower is better"

Reply to dirtmountain

oooohh im so stupid it was time of course lower is better hahaahahahahahahhahah i didnt think much there im pretty tired so excuse me for that

Message edited by Derbixrace on 11-01-2009 at 02:00:37 AM

Reply to Derbixrace

I had posted a question on reduced hyperstransport speeds at Anandtech and the general consensus was that it would have a noticeable effect if using onboard graphics but negligible if using a discreet graphics card. I googled but could not find any bench mark comparisons of running a cpu in a reduced hyperstransport AM2 board versus a AM2+ boards. I would think that there must be enough AM2 users such as myself that this would be of viable interest.

pepperman wrote :

Under normal circumstances (a board that supports hypertransport 3.0) I would say do it; your board, however, only supports hypertransport 2.0, which runs at half the speed of 3.0. Considering this, the anandtech comparison is no longer valid as the 630 will not perform as well as it is shown there. In short, you will likely take a performance hit in games and singlethreaded apps, but if you do anything that utilizes more than 2 cores (cad, photoshop, etc.) you will see an increase in performance.

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Reply to geepondy

Best answer

No, hypertransport won't affect performance much unless you use a very data intensive application such as server stuff. The huge amount of raw data will impact servers.

However, in general day to day useage (such as gaming), there is only at most a 1-3% performance difference. Hardly enough to justify upgrading to a new motherboard.

Reply to amdfangirl

geepondy wrote :

I had posted a question on reduced hyperstransport speeds at Anandtech and the general consensus was that it would have a noticeable effect if using onboard graphics but negligible if using a discreet graphics card. I googled but could not find any bench mark comparisons of running a cpu in a reduced hyperstransport AM2 board versus a AM2+ boards. I would think that there must be enough AM2 users such as myself that this would be of viable interest.

I would think so to, but alas, I couldn't find any benchmarks.

Are you interested in overclocking? If so, you could easily OC the 630 to speeds where there would be sizable performance increases in single thread performance over your current 6000 (I recommend you get a decent heatsink/fan to get the most out of it if you choose this route), plus you would of course have the advantage of four cores for future software.

Reply to pepperman

If youre looking for longevity.....the 630 is total pwnage for the price. Sooner or later games are going to run more than 2 threads-when that time come, the 630 will really kick ass.

Wish Intel releases cheap stuff like this.....

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Reply to madass

madass wrote :

If youre looking for longevity.....the 630 is total pwnage for the price. Sooner or later games are going to run more than 2 threads-when that time come, the 630 will really kick ass.

Wish Intel releases cheap stuff like this.....

A rather large number of games released lately already use more than 2 cores.

Reply to loneninja

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