AMD Athlon II X3 425 Processor Review

Priced between the Athlon II X3 425 and the Core i3-530 – is this processor better than either of them? Is it worth considering?

The Processor

Here’s the Athlon II X3 425.

Here’s the stock heatsink. The heatsink is a taller than the one for the X2 250, just like the one for X4 620.

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

Here’s the CPU-Z capture of the processor on overclock, I did a quick 20% overclock and it seemed to work fine, didn’t up the voltage.

Test Setup

The test setup used for this review.

Processor	AMD Athlon II X3 425
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 X3 425 is benched in both stock and overclocked state, it will be compared to the Athlon II X4 620 and the Intel Core i3-530

Super PI 1.5 Mod

The value chosen for Super PI was 1M.

X3 425	X3 425 OC	X4 620	i3-530
29.032	24.804	29.999	14.508
* Lower the better

Super PI is a single-core benchmark. The 2.7ghz X3 is ahead of the X4.

CINEBENCH R10

Processor	X3 425	X3 425 OC	X4 620	i3-530
Rendering (Single CPU)	2316	2768	2237	3323
Rendering (Multiple CPU)	6178	7418	8088	7511

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

Regardless of how it’s overclocked, the X4 still leads the pack in multi-CPU score even when against the overclocked X3, despite being slower in the single CPU score.

The X3 itself on overclock is very close to the 3ghz i3-530 that costs about 50% more.

PCMark Vantage

X3 425	X3 425 OC	X4 620	i3-530
5090	5548	5352	5392
* Higher the better

X3 425 overtakes everyone only when overclocked.

Fritz Chess Benchmark

Processor	X3 425	X3 425 OC	X4 620	i3-530
Relative Speed	9.67	12.08	12.52	17.25
Kilo Nodes/second	4643	5797	6011	8280

X3 is still far behind the other 2, even when overclocked.

SiSoft SANDRA Lite

Processor	X3 425	X3 425 OC	X4 620	i3-530
Aggregate Arithmetic	27.11 GOPS	32.66 GOPS	32.59 GOPS	34.6 GOPS
Dhrystone ALU	27.52 GIPS	33.22 GIPS	30.9 GIPS	36.45 GIPS
Whetstone iSSE3	26.7 GFLOPS	32 GFLOPS	34.28 GFLOPS	32.74 GFLOPS
Aggregate Multi-Media	57 MPixel/s	68.58 MPixel/s	73.15 MPixel/s	58.79 MPixel/s
Multi-Media Int	79.25 MPixel/s	95.42 MPixel/s	101.83 MPixel/s	64.64 MPixel/s
Multi-Media Float	34.64 MPixel/s	41.75 MPixel/s	44.46 MPixel/s	53.00 MPixel/s
Multi-Media Double	18.9 MPixel/s	22.7 MPixel/s	24.0 MPixel/s	27.51 MPixel/s

On its own, the X3 is just behind the other 2. On overclock, the speed compensates for the lack of cores and come pretty close to the X4 620. And in some ways, perform decently compared to the i3-530.

Thermal Performance

Tests were done with the stock heatsink.

Processor	X3 425	X3 425 OC
Idle	30°C	33°C
Load	52°C	55°C

Conclusion

Pitting this processor against the X4 620 and i3 530 isn’t exactly fair, after all the X4 620 costs 33% more while the i3-530 costs about 70% more. So considering the performance you get out of this processor, it’s great value for money!

It comes to about RM 80 per core, which is similar to the X4 620. You could say it’s the X4 620 with 3 cores and being 100mhz faster.