Game-Off: Seven Sub-$150 Processors Compared

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Interesting article-it clearly shows the advantage of having four physical cores of the Athlon II and the Phenom II X4s over the hyper-threaded Core i3s in real-world situations.No doubt that this article will benefit people who want the perfect processor for their money at this price range
 
I am glad an RTS was used in this benchmark. More CPU heavy games should be included in the benchmark for Processor benchmarking.

With that said, there was a mention that the 6MB L3 cache may have helped the Phenom II X4 945, I wonder what would happen with a Phenom II X2 or X3 by comparison if this actually makes a significant impact. It could prove there is a significant advantage to cheaper AMD CPUs then the Athlon IIs in this benchmark.
 
Found a typo on the chart, I don't see why you would compare the Intel i3-530 against itself. 😛
 
[citation][nom]Tamz_msc[/nom]Interesting article-it clearly shows the advantage of having four physical cores of the Athlon II and the Phenom II X4s over the hyper-threaded Core i3s in real-world situations.No doubt that this article will benefit people who want the perfect processor for their money at this price range[/citation]


sorry but i must disagree...

the core i3 530 was 8% faster than the athlon X4 and costs $5 less
its a great processor it seems, a nice change from intel. but i admit, my heart sunk after seeing amd's athlon X4 get beat. its like sports, i root for AMD

please dont quote the multitasking benchmark as no sane person compresses stuff while gaming...
yes the athlon would probably be better overall for most people, but not for gaming



 
AMD has it in this price range as usual... Still nice to see the x4 940 and x4 640 compared, I've been wondering how big a difference to expect from the additional cache. At least with the i3 530 intel has something to show here if you just game, but I'll take a true quad any day thanks :)
 

That is why I said real world situations.People use their PCs for stuff other than gaming in most of the part they are turned on.The AMD quad cores clearly have the edge with respect to overall performance.
 
I guess this is a symbolic article where-in Toms is also telling us that we have to all eventually let go of those dusting core2 chips...

Interesting that Aliens Vs Predator can be used as a true benchmark between GPUs and in DX11 games since the CPU differences wont really matter. One question, what if these chips were compared to a Phenom X6 or even a core i7 1366 socket chip? If not, then one can truly compare the 5870 vs the gtx480 head to head.
 
[citation][nom]luke904[/nom]sorry but i must disagree...the core i3 530 was 8% faster than the athlon X4 and costs $5 lessits a great processor it seems, a nice change from intel. but i admit, my heart sunk after seeing amd's athlon X4 get beat. its like sports, i root for AMDplease dont quote the multitasking benchmark as no sane person compresses stuff while gaming...yes the athlon would probably be better overall for most people, but not for gaming[/citation]

still, AMD's Phenom II X4 beats the cr*p out of the i3 and that for about 20 dollars more, so i do think AMD's quad cores are the best performers here.
 
Also in the Athlon II x3 article all the games weren't set on highest graphics settings - Only set on "high" (not highest / ultra etc.) and with AA / AF disabled, which, despite the high resolution, gave the 5870 lots of room to breathe and demonstrated the cpu bottleneck. Why would anyone want to get the 5870 and not crank all the eye candy up is beyond me. I understand that the article was trying to get the point (and point taken) but I'm sure lots of people were fooled to think that they'll actually see that much more performance if they get the i7-920 while they didn't realize that it was only for educational reasons (because it wasn't said in the article). Too bad :)
 
This shows how AMD rules the budget segment with their offerings. But if you analyze the Intel chips included, clearly Intel has the advantage of per core performance since only their dual cores are present in this event (because the other chips with more cores are quite expensive).

Indeed, gaming on lower resolutions tend to depend not only on GPU but also to the CPU. This is where CPU has the most noticeable effects on gaming performance.
 
Don't forget that Intel's higher clock efficiency and SMT (HyperThreading) is probably the reason that their cpus are more expensive. You also pay more for the igp embedded inside the i3's. So if you're on a budget you should ask yourself, do you want a clock efficient, multitask un-efficient, relatively expensive core i3, or a less efficient but with a higher core count athlon / phenom II.. That's the whole deal my friends
 
Fantastic article. Im looking to upgrade from an Athlon x2 6000+ and can't decide if the athlon II 440 or go for the phenom II 955 or just hold out for a rebuild and go LGA1156 if it drops when LGA1155 releases. Phenom II makes sense for me since most articles say my mobo is a poor overclocker so the unlocked multiplier on the 955 seems the best but Im looking at stock performance just incase even that fails. The athlon II 260 seems to get half the performance of the Phenom II 940 and the 6000+ would be below even that. Phenom does seem the perfect upgrade for the price! Would love to see how everything changes after overclocking since that could push me towards a cheap 32nm dual core.
 
Good article. I personally put more emphasis on the multitasking benchmark, since most of us have some form of background processes running tasks while we game, so in my opinion that benchmark more accurately represents real-world data.

In the end, I think the real winnner here is AMD's quad-core offerings. Never would have I put together "$150" and "Quad-core" within he same sentence, but now that's not absurd thanks to AMD.
 
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