Athlon II P320

[ilaptop]

Hello,

how is the perfomance of the Athlon II dual-core P320 compared to Phenom II triple-core P820 and core i3 350M?

Would I notice a sensitive slow don in programs such as office excel and sas with the order of thousands of data and for light gaming (Paradox games like Europa Universalis III and Victoria II)?

All 3 system would have 4 GB of Ram.

 

[WR2]

Passmark CPU scores:
AMD Athlon II P320 Dual-Core = 1283
AMD Phenom II P820 Triple-Core = 1612
Intel Core i3 350M @ 2.27GHz = 2073

Between P320 and P820 - you might not notice the difference.
Between P820 and i3 350M - you might not notice the difference.
Between P320 and i3 350M - you probably would notice the difference.

 

[ilaptop]

Passmark CPU scores:
AMD Athlon II P320 Dual-Core = 1283
AMD Phenom II P820 Triple-Core = 1612
Intel Core i3 350M @ 2.27GHz = 2073

Between P320 and P820 - you might not notice the difference.
Between P820 and i3 350M - you might not notice the difference.
Between P320 and i3 350M - you probably would notice the difference.

thanks for the reply. Would a difference of 130$ between the P320 and P820 justify the difference in performance?

 

[WR2]

It's possibly could. If the primary purpose of the laptop is heavily business related (MS Office & SAS database).
I don't know enough about SAS to know if a faster dual core would be better than a slower 3 core CPU.
MS Excel would favor the faster dual core in most situations.

 

[ilaptop]

It's possibly could. If the primary purpose of the laptop is heavily business related (MS Office & SAS database).
I don't know enough about SAS to know if a faster dual core would be better than a slower 3 core CPU.
MS Excel would favor the faster dual core in most situations.

do you think the triple-core is slower? The triple-core P820 is more expensive than the dual core P320, it might be the same speed in single core applications but it should be much faster in multi-core ones. I believe SAS can use multi-core systems as much as excel...

 

[WR2]

After looking over some dual core/triple core desktop benchmarks I'm starting to think that 300Mhz speed difference between P320 (2.1ghz) and P820 (1.8Ghz) isn't enough of a gap to push the dual core out in front in MS Excel.
X2 555 3.2Ghz vs x3 710 2.6Ghz That 600Mhz difference gave the X3 a bit more than 10% improvement in Excel Monte Carlo simulation. You'd expect the 300Mhz gap in the laptop CPUs to be less than 10% difference, but still in favor of the P820. So maybe 5-6% improvement for $130 in Excel?
That's about as close an estimate as I think I can dig out for you.

 

[ilaptop]

After looking over some dual core/triple core desktop benchmarks I'm starting to think that 300Mhz speed difference between P320 (2.1ghz) and P820 (1.8Ghz) isn't enough of a gap to push the dual core out in front in MS Excel.
X2 555 3.2Ghz vs x3 710 2.6Ghz That 600Mhz difference gave the X3 a bit more than 10% improvement in Excel Monte Carlo simulation. You'd expect the 300Mhz gap in the laptop CPUs to be less than 10% difference, but still in favor of the P820. So maybe 5-6% improvement for $130 in Excel?
That's about as close an estimate as I think I can dig out for you.

ok thanks, so from what i gather, the Phenom II P820 is not much better than the Athlon II P320, it has one more core but on the other hand it's 300 Mhz slower...

The core i3 350M of course would be a huge improvement above them, and the laptop with it would costs even less than the triple-core AMD, but it has a 320 GB HDD that turns me off... It also didn't receive great reviews due to random freezes...
So I guess I'll go with the cheapest, the Athlon II P320. Hopefully it won't bottleneck my work and games, if it does I'll come back at you

 

[ilaptop]

Best answer selected by ilaptop.