This article is not exactly a review but it’s a quick comparison of the 3 Athlon II processors I’ve reviewed this year – I guess an article to compare all of them side by side on stock speed would come in handy.

The Candidates

Athlon II X2 250 | 3Ghz | 1MB cache
Athlon II X3 425 | 2.7Ghz | 1.5MB cache
Athlon II X4 620 | 2.6Ghz | 2MB cache

Objective

The purpose of this article is to observe the difference between the dual, tri and quad core processors within similar price range. It would also show the performance differences between a faster speed dual core against the lesser speed tri and quad cores.

The X2 250 retails at around RM 230, X3 425 at around RM 245 and the X4 620 at around RM 330.

*Suddenly the memory of my secondary school days (more than 15 years ago) flashes through my mind. How I’ve never enjoyed having to document the steps and result details back then, of which I now realize that I’ve been doing what I used to hate for the past 3 years or so. Oh the irony…….

Benchmarks

Super PI 1.5 Mod

The value chosen for Super PI was 1M.

3ghz vs 2.7ghz vs 2.6ghz on a single core benchmark, it’s nothing new.

CINEBENCH R10

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

I have no idea why X3′s single-CPU is higher than X2′s single-CPU but the multi-CPU scores show that more cores work better for such applications.

PCMark Vantage

The cores make the difference. 4 cores at 2.6ghz is still faster than 2 cores at 3.ghz in this case.

Fritz Chess Benchmark

Yet again the scores scale along with the number of processors. The extra clock speed didn’t help.

SiSoft SANDRA Lite

My Thoughts

Putting all 3 of them together, I’d say the Athlon II X3 425 and X4 620 processors have the best value for money. I thought the X2 250 was good before but after testing out the X3 and X4 – I must say that it’s not much of a value, considering the X2 250 is only less than RM 20 apart from the X3 425. There’s the cheaper X2 425 but it still comes to about RM 100 per core, while better than the X2 250′s RM 115 per core, both are still behind the X3 425 and X4 620′s RM 80 per core.

Which one to buy? The X3 425 for those in tight budget, the X4 620 for those who are willing to stretch a little further for the processing power of an additional core.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 25th, 2010 at 12:13 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.