Test Systems

We did some significant changes to the hardware used for this review. First of all, the XFX HD 4870 X2 went into graphics card heaven and it was quickly replaced by Sapphire's HD 4890 BattleStation Edition. This means results from our last review are not usable here in Gaming tests and Power consumption tests. Some of the models have been retested, some are new, and one will be missing from Gaming and Power Consumption tests - Core 2 Duo E8200. The CPU was simply not available at the time to do retesting with the new VGA card.

Other than that, the motherboard for Intel's Celeron and Pentium was changed to ASUS P5QC. Since it's the same P45 chipset and the same DDR3 memory, performance differences should be negligible. Speaking of memory, Intel Celeron E1600 and Pentium E5200 support DDR3 up to 800 MHz due to low FSB, so to make things a little more "fair", CAS settings were set to 5-5-5 2T. Core 2 Duo E8200 was tested with an ASRock motherboard using 1333 MHz DDR3 with CAS 7 settings.




Below you can see the entire list of programs used to test our processors. Most of the tests make good use of multithreading, but just like real-life situations, there are some tests that prefer higher clock frequencies over number of cores or size of L2/L3 cache buffer.

Benchmark Suite

• Everest Ultimate 5.02 - Read/Write/Copy/Latency
• PC Mark Vantage
• 3D Mark Vantage v1.0.1 Performance preset
• wPrime 32M v2.0

• Handbrake 0.9.3 - DVD rip to .mkv
• Xilisoft Video Converter Ultimate v5.1.20 - .mov 1080p encode to .mpeg-4
• DivX Converter 7.0 - AVI encode with Home Theater preset

• BonkEncoder v1.0.13 .flac encode with LAME MP3 320 kbs
• I'm Too Audio Encoder v2.1.77 - WMA encode with LAME MP3 320 kbs

• Photoshop CS4
• Cinebench R10
• Blender 2.49
• POV Ray 3.7b

• 7zip v4.65 32 MB mutithreding
• WinRAR 3.9 Benchmark
• WinRAR 3.9 compression - 688 MB file

• Tom Clancy's HAWX v1.1 - high details
• Resident Evil 5 benchmark - medium details
• Section 8 v1.0 - high details
• GTR Evolution v1.0 - high details, Level 1 AA
• Far Cry 2 v1.3 - DirectX 10, High Details

• Prime95 for maximum heat and consumption
• CPU-Z 1.52
• AMD Overdrive 3.02