AMD Phenom vs. Athlon Core Shootout

Features
By Patrick Schmid
published

Application Benchmarks

Rendering a high definition scene in 3DSMax is considerably faster on a single Phenom core than on an Athlon 64 X2 using only one core. Considering that rendering applications usually scale well with more CPU cores, the performance gain with Phenom over Athlon 64 X2 is significant. Check out our Phenom review for details with all cores enables.

The rendering performance under Cinema4D increased as well, but the gains weren't as significant here. Unlike 3DSMax, this time we were rendering an animation sequence.

Photoshop CS3 by Adobe is one of the most popular image editing applications; its filters, which are available from third party vendors, are particularly demanding. Phenom shows slight advantages over the Athlon 64 X2 when only one core is used, but as with most professional applications, Photoshop can be accelerated nicely using multiple processing cores.

Many users use WinRAR to compress files before they email them. The benefit of a single Phenom core over a single Athlon 64 X2 core is very small here.

Patrick Schmid
4 Comments Comment from the forums
  • spearhead
    its architecture it fine but
    it is clock speed the phenom lacks. if amd can just bump its speed up to around 3ghz-3.6ghz then it would make good competition towards faster intels. i can conclude from this benchmark that if you buy an phenom 9850 and clock it around 3ghz you have much more horse power then you would have with an athlon x2 6000+ however some benchmarks might tell you something else it makes sence if you use 1066mhz memory or just 800mhz mem
    Reply
  • tagasur
    i wish tom's would update this topic with new benchmarks on the amd phenom 9850be. i'd like to know if it's more stable now that the "nasty bug" has been remedied with the march 2008 product line refresh.
    Reply
  • brian1143
    Well this review says its not much more performance. I'm upgrading from 939 and actually thinking of getting the $60 AMD Athlon 64 X2 7750 (AM2+) and OC it to at least 3ghz and run 1066 memory. I'd rather save the money for the future rather than have a few extra FPS.

    Intel's core i7 really is clearly the better processor with more headroom, but AMD has always had them in the price to performance ratio department. AMD isn't going away and perhaps they can make a better processor like when Athlon 64 came out or at least close the gap and let their price to performance ratio carry them the rest of the way. (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/overclock-phenom-ii,2119.html)

    Reply
  • mypobox
    Is an athlon II x3 really better then a phenom I x4 for 73$ at newegg ??
    Reply