Priced between the Athlon II X2 250 and the Core i3-530 – is this processor better than either of them? Is it work considering?

The Processor

Here’s the Athlon II X4 620 itself.

Here’s the stock heatsink. The heatsink itself is a taller than the one for the X2 250.

Here’s the CPU-Z capture of the processor specification.

Here’s the CPU-Z capture of the processor on overclock, I did a quick 20% overclock and it seemed to work fine, I know it shows lower voltage on the screenshot but on the BIOS side I just added 0.01 to it.

More details here.

Test Setup

The test setup used for this review.

Processor	AMD Athlon II X4 620
RAM	OCZ 1066mhz 4GB Dual-Channel Kit
Motherboard	MSI 770-C45
Graphic card	Galaxy GT220 1GB DDR3
Cooler	Stock heatsink
Monitor	20″ Dell Ultra-sharp Wide-screen LCD
Power Supply	Gigabyte Odin GT 550w
Operating System	Windows 7 32bit

Benchmarks

The Athlon II X4 620 is benched in both stock and overclocked state, it will be compared to the Athlon II X2 250 and the Intel Core i3-530

Super PI 1.5 Mod

The value chosen for Super PI was 1M.

X4 620	X4 620 OC	X2 250	i3-530
29.999	25.537	27.003	14.508
* Lower the better

Super PI is a single-core benchmark. The 2.6ghz alone is running behind the X2 250′s 3ghz single core speed. Both of them of course, being behind the i3-530.

CINEBENCH R10

Processor	X4 620	X4 620 OC	X2 250	i3-530
Rendering (Single CPU)	2237	2667	2311	3323
Rendering (Multiple CPU)	8088	9583	5193	7511

The benchmark was done with default settings. Here’s where you can download MAXON CINEBENCH R10.

The X4 620 shines here as it is the only TRUE quad-core in among the pack.

PCMark Vantage

X4 620	X4 620 OC	X2 250	i3-530
5352	5916	4890	5392
* Higher the better

Fritz Chess Benchmark

Processor	X4 620	X4 620 OC	X2 250	i3-530
Relative Speed	12.52	15.24	7.67	17.25
Kilo Nodes/second	6011	7402	3680	8280

While a lot faster than the X2, it is still behind the i3-530 but the gap is much reduced after having 20% overclock.

SiSoft SANDRA Lite

Processor	X4 620	X4 620 OC	X2 250	i3-530
Aggregate Arithmetic	32.59 GOPS	41.4 GOPS	19.8 GOPS	34.6 GOPS
Dhrystone ALU	30.9 GIPS	42.14 GIPS	19.82 GIPS	36.45 GIPS
Whetstone iSSE3	34.28 GFLOPS	40.68 GFLOPS	19.8 GFLOPS	32.74 GFLOPS
Aggregate Multi-Media	73.15 MPixel/s	88 MPixel/s	42 MPixel/s	58.79 MPixel/s
Multi-Media Int	101.83 MPixel/s	122.53 MPixel/s	58.24 MPixel/s	64.64 MPixel/s
Multi-Media Float	44.46 MPixel/s	53.28 MPixel/s	25.8 MPixel/s	53.00 MPixel/s
Multi-Media Double	24.0 MPixel/s	29.13 MPixel/s	14 MPixel/s	27.51 MPixel/s

The i3-530 is a speed demon but being just a dual-core with Hyper-Threading (2 cores, 2 threads per core), the performance is less impressive compared to true quad cores (4 cores, 1 thread per core)

Thermal Performance

Tests were done with the stock heatsink.

Processor	X4 620	X4 620 OC
Idle	28°C	28°C
Load	49°C	53°C

Temperature looks good for a quad core. I had quite a few quad cores with me and they all seem very hot. The X4 620 runs pretty cool in my book, despite having being a 95w TDP processor.

Conclusion

The AMD Athlon X4 620 is an awesome processor in my book. Compared to the X2 250, it costs about RM 100 (about 40%) extra but you get 4 cores running at 2.6ghz with 512Kb L2 cache per core instead of 2 cores at 3.0ghz with 1Mb L2 cache per core.

Compared to the i3-530, it is 75% the cost but you get 4 cores instead of 2 cores with 4 threads.

Despite the comparison above, it is in no way saying any of those processors are bad – they all have their strengths and weaknesses. The X4 620 shines most when the application utilizes quad-core processing power.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 12:58 am and is filed under Hardware Reviews, Processors and Motherboards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.