AMD Athlon X2 7850 BE AM2+
Last week's launch of the Phenom II X4 955 was a big win with the enthusiast crowd. This week, however, it looks like AMD has shifted focused to the mainstream market. Not only is the highly anticipated Radeon HD 4770 launching today, but also a new dual core Black Edition processor: the Athlon X2 7850 AD785ZWCGHBOX. Based on the updated K10 Kuma architecture, the 2.8GHz X2 7850 is poised to take over as AMD's flagship dual core processor. At only $69 USD, it's also shaping up to be quite a bargain. Benchmark Reviews has thoroughly tested this new processor, and today we bring you our results.
At 2.8GHz, the Athlon X2 7850 BE inches ahead of the 2.7 GHz Athlon X2 7750 launched in December of last year. Beyond the 100 MHz bump in clock speed, however, these chips are essentially the same. That's not necessary a bad thing, though. Clock-for-clock, the new Kuma based dual cores from AMD are much faster than the outgoing Brisbane core, thanks in part to the improved architecture, level 3 cache, and the addition of new instruction sets.
With a price tag of only $69, the Athlon X2 7850 will compete directly with Intel's Pentium Dual Core line-up. However, its excellent price/performance ratio could pose a threat to the Core 2 Duo family as well. That said, today's review will focus not only on performance, but also on value. Even in good economic times this is a top concern of most consumers, and in today's market it's even more important, particularly when you consider the steep prices of high-end quad core systems.
About Advanced Micro Devices, Inc (AMD)
Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD) is an innovative technology company dedicated to collaborating with customers and partners to ignite the next generation of computing and graphics solutions at work, home, and play.
Over the course of AMD's three decades in business, silicon and software have become the steel and plastic of the worldwide digital economy. Technology companies have become global pacesetters, making technical advances at a prodigious rate - always driving the industry to deliver more and more, faster and faster.
However, "technology for technology's sake" is not the way we do business at AMD. Our history is marked by a commitment to innovation that's truly useful for customers - putting the real needs of people ahead of technical one-upmanship. AMD founder Jerry Sanders has always maintained that "customers should come first, at every stage of a company's activities."
We believe our company history bears that out.
Athlon X2 AM2+ Black Edition Features
Dual-core. Performance tuning potential. Whether you're building a new machine or upgrading an existing system, the AMD Athlon X2 Black Edition Processor delivers heart-pounding performance at an exceptionally affordable price.
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Even wider bandwidth with HyperTransport 3 technology
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Clock Multiplier Control* and Advanced Clock Calibration put processor performance in your hands
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Advanced performance controls with AMD OverDrive software and the AMD Fusion for Gaming utility
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Cool'n'Quiet 2.0 technology can help reduce heat and noise
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Integrated DDR2 memory controller and shared L3 cache for low-latency access to main memory for amazingly response
AD785ZWCGHBOX Specifications
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Processor Core Frequency: 2.8GHz
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X2 7850 Black Edition Tray OPN: OPN# AD785ZWCJ2BGH
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X2 7850 Black Edition PIB OPN: OPN# AD785ZWCGHBOX
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L1 Cache Sizes: 64K of L1 instruction and 64K of L1 data cache per core (256KB total L1 per processor)
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L2 Cache Sizes: 512KB of L2 data cache per core (1MB total L2 per processor)
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L3 Cache Size: 2MB (shared)
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Total Cache (L2+L3): 3MB
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Memory Controller Type: Integrated 128-bit wide memory controller
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Memory Controller Speed: Up to 1.8GHz with Dual Dynamic Power Management
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Types of Memory Supported: Support for unregistered DIMMs up to PC2 8500 (DDR2-1066MHz)
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HyperTransport 3.0: One 16-bit/16-bit link @ up to 3.6GHz full duplex (1.8GHz x2)
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Total Processor-to-system Bandwidth: Up to 28.5 GB/s bandwidth [Up to 17.1GB/s memory bandwidth (DDR2-1066) + 14.4GB/s (HT3)]
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Packaging: Socket AM2+ 940-pin organic micro pin grid array (micro-PGA)
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Fab location: GLOBALFOUNDARIES Fab 1 module 1 in Dresden, Germany (formerly AMD Fab 36)
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Process Technology: 65-nanometer DSL SOI (silicon-on-insulator) technology
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Approximate Transistor count: ~ 450 million (65nm)
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Approximate Die Size: 285 mm2 (65nm)
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Max Ambient Case Temp: 73o Celsius
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Nominal Voltage: 1.2-1.25 Volts
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Max TDP: 95 Watts
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MSRP: $69
Closer Look: Athlon X2 7850 BE
The AMD Athlon X2 7850 Black Edition processor is based on the same Stars microarchitecture as the original Phenom family. Thanks to the native quad core design, AMD can bin their processors into two-core, three-core, and four-core variants depending on yield and consumer demand. The Athlon X2 7850, then, is essentially a quad-core Phenom with two of the cores disabled.
Fortunately, even with two cores disabled, AMD is able to salvage the entire level 3 cache of the original chip. The reason why is simple: the original design calls for the level 3 cache to be shared and accessible to each core. Eliminating two cores simply means less competition for the cache.
In addition to more cache per core, eliminating two cores has the added benefit of reducing energy consumption and heat output. This translates into a higher clock speed for the remaining two cores, without an increase in TDP. In the case of Athlon X2 7850 BE, the result is 2.8 GHz at 95W. Of course, thanks to the unlocked Black Edition multiplier, the frequency can easily be increased further. In our preliminary testing, we were able to get it up to 3.4 GHz with a decent HSF.
Testing & Results
Before I begin any benchmarking or overclocking, I thoroughly stress the CPU and memory by running Prime95 on all available cores for 12 hours. If no errors are found, I move on to a gaming stress test. To do this, I use Prime95 again to stress the processor, while running an instance of FurMark's stability test on top of this. If the computer survives this test for 2 hours without lockup or corruption, I consider it to be stable and ready for overclocking. After achieving what I feel is stable overclock, I run to these tests again for certainty. The goal of this stress testing is to ensure the clock speeds and settings are stable before performing any benchmarks. After all, what good are performance measures if the system cannot reliably produce them.
Once the hardware is prepared, we begin our testing. Each benchmark test program begins after a system restart, and the very first result for every test will be ignored since it often only caches the test. This process proved extremely important in the World in Conflict and Supreme Commander benchmarks, as the first run served to cache maps allowing subsequent tests to perform much better than the first. Each test is completed five times, with the average results displayed in our article.
Intel LGA775 Test System
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Processors: Intel Core 2 Duo E7400, Core 2 Quad Q9450
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System Memory: 2x2GB OCZ Platinum DDR3 (1333MHz@6-6-6-20 & 1066MHz@6-6-6-15)
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Disk Drive: Seagate ST380815AS 80GB
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Optical Drive: LITE-ON iHAS122-04 DVD Burner
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PSU: Corsair TX850W
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Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP3
AMD Socket AM3 Test System
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Motherboard: Asus M4A79T Deluxe
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System Memory: 2x2GB OCZ Platinum DDR3 (1600MHz@7-7-7-24)
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Disk Drive: Seagate ST380815AS 80GB
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Optical Drive: LITE-ON iHAS122-04 DVD Burner
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PSU: Corsair TX850W
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Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP3
AMD Socket AM2/AM2+ Test System
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Processors: AMD Athlon X2 4850e, Athlon X2 7850 BE
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Motherboard: Asus M3A78-EM
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System Memory: 2x2GB Corsair XMS2 DHX DDR2 (800MHz@4-4-4-12)
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Disk Drive: Seagate ST380815AS 80GB
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Optical Drive: LITE-ON iHAS122-04 DVD Burner
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PSU: Corsair TX850W
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Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP3
Benchmark Applications
Devil May Cry 4 Gaming
Devil May Cry 4 is one of the newest additions to Benchmark Reviews' testing suite. Fortunately for us, Capcom recognized the community's interest in hardware testing and included a built in benchmarking tool with this game. In fact, it is even included it in the demo. The benchmarking tool runs through four different scene, all of which I highly recommend watching. However, for the purposes of our review, we only report the scores of the most challenging tests: scenes 2 and 4.
When testing a CPU, the settings we choose are a bit different than a typical video card review. As you'll see in the charts below, modern games can easily max out the processing abilities of the video card and mask any differences between the CPUs. For this reason, we generally start at low resolutions and quality settings and slowly ramp them up until we hit the limit of the video card. This allows us to quickly distinguish differences between CPUs and identify any other limiting hardware.
As expected, we see a nice staggered effect among the processors. The Athlon X2 4850e performs the worst, but is also the least expensive and least power hungry of all the processors tested. The Kuma-based X2 7850 brings a decent increase in performance, but can't quite keep up with the more expensive Intel Core 2 Duo E7400.
After an increase to resolution and quality, the staggered effect disappears a bit. The E7400, Q9450, and AMD X4 955 are essentially tied, with the X2 7850 following closely behind.
Increasing the resolution and quality again reveals the limits of our HD 4870 video card. At these settings, all but AMD 4850e are within about 5% of each other.
EVEREST Benchmark Tests
EVEREST Ultimate Edition is an industry leading system diagnostics and benchmarking solution for enthusiasts PC users, based on the award-winning EVEREST Technology. During system optimizations and tweaking it provides essential system and overclock information, advanced hardware monitoring and diagnostics capabilities to check the effects of the applied settings. CPU, FPU and memory benchmarks are available to measure the actual system performance and compare it to previous states or other systems. Furthermore, complete software, operating system and security information makes EVEREST Ultimate Edition a comprehensive system diagnostics tool that offers a total of 100 pages of information about your PC.
The first benchmarks used in our testbed: Queen, Photoworxx, ZLib, and AES, all rely on basic x86 instructions, and consume very low system memory while also being aware of HyperThreading, multi-processors, and multi-core processors. We follow this with EVEREST's memory benchmarks and round things out with some floating point tests.
The first test, Queen, attempts to measure the branch prediction and mismatch penalties of the processor's architecture. Here, Intel's Wolfdale E7400 has a slight advantage over the Kuma-based Athlon X2 7850. Move on the PhotoWorxx test, however, and the X2 7850 takes the lead. Of course, given the multi-threaded nature of these tests, neither can compete against the quad-core Q9450 and X4 955 CPUs.
The ZLib compression test and AES encryption test tell a similar story, with the X2 7850 and Intel E7400 trading off for the dual-core lead. In terms of integer performance, it would appear that these two processors are tied.
Turning our attention to the memory benchmarks, we see some interesting results. The X2 4850e and X2 7850 tie up nicely on read and copy benchmarks, but when it comes to memory write performance, the X2 7850 comes in last.
The floating point benchmarks mirror what we saw in last week's Phenom II X4 955 article. Intel clearly has the upper hand in the single precision Julia test, but as we move into the double precision Mandel test and extended precision Sin Julia test, Intel loses its advantage. Here, the E7400's lead over the X2 7850 is narrowed to only about 7%.
Crysis Gaming
Crysis uses a new graphics engine: the CryENGINE2, which is the successor to Far Cry's CryENGINE. CryENGINE2 is among the first engines to use the Direct3D 10 (DirectX10) framework of Windows Vista, but can also run using DirectX9, both on Vista and Windows XP.
Roy Taylor, Vice President of Content Relations at NVIDIA, has spoken on the subject of the engine's complexity, stating that Crysis has over a million lines of code, 1GB of texture data, and 85,000 shaders. To get the most out of modern multicore processor architectures, CPU intensive subsystems of CryENGINE 2 such as physics, networking and sound, have been re-written to support multi-threading.
Crysis offers an in-game benchmark tool, which is similar to World in Conflict. This short test does place some high amounts of stress on a graphics card, since there are so many landscape features rendered. For benchmarking purposes, Crysis can mean trouble as it places a high demand on both GPU and CPU resources. Benchmark Reviews uses the Crysis Benchmark Tool by Mad Boris to test frame rates in batches, which allows the results of many tests to be averaged.
Similar to the Devil Mary Cry 4 gaming benchmarks, we will start testing Crysis at lower settings to reduce the impact of GPU limitations. From there, we'll slowly increase resolution and quality settings until we reach the limit of our HD 4870.
As was the case in the Devil May Cry 4 benchmarks, at the lower settings, the processors are nicely staggered with the quad-cores in the lead. In this first test, the Athlon X2 7850 offers 10 additional frames per second over the X2 4850e, but falls about 25% short of the Intel E7400.
At slightly higher settings, the results are nearly identical. The X2 7850, while an improvement over the X2 4850e, can't keep up with the more expensive Intel E7400 in Crisis.
One last increase to resolution and quality pushes us to the limit of our HD 4870 video card. At these settings, even the high end Phenom II X4 955 can't offer our struggling video card much help. In the case of the Athlon X2 4850e, however, the CPU is the limiting factor. Clearly, a high performance video card such as the HD 4870 needs to be matched with at least an Athlon X2 7850 to realize its full potential.
Passmark PerformanceTest
PassMark PerformanceTest is a PC hardware benchmark utility that allows a user to quickly assess the performance of their computer and compare it to a number of standard 'baseline' computer systems. The Passmark PerformanceTest CPU tests all benchmark the mathematical operations, compression, encryption, SSE, and 3DNow! instructions of modern processors.
In our tests there were several areas of concentration for each benchmark, which are combined into one compound score. This score is referred to as the CPU Mark, and is a composite of the following tests: Integer Math, Floating Point Math, Find Prime Numbers, SSE/3DNow!, Compression, Encryption, Image Rotation, and String Sorting. For this review, we've also decided to run the memory benchmark, which results in a composite score based on the following tests: small block allocation, cached read, uncached read, write performance, and large block allocation.
In contrast to first synthetic benchmark suite we tested with, Everest, Passmark PerformanceTest places the Athlon X2 7850 roughly 25% behind the Intel E7400 in both CPU and memory performance. For a $69 chip, however, this is not such a bad place to be, particularly when you consider the E7400 costs almost twice as much.
PCMark05 Benchmark Tests
Using synthetic benchmarks to compare one product to another has some distinct advantages when testing similar hardware, yet I have never found myself completely satisfied by the process. I have come to understand that they're important for comparing "apples to apples", and that the results are usually very consistent. But as with any synthetic benchmark, the numbers can often mean very little more than just numbers. We don't take a high score on a synthetic benchmark to mean that a product will/should perform well, and neither should you. The difference between projected performance and actual performance is the difference between fire and the fire-fly.
PCMark is a series of computer benchmark tools developed by Futuremark. The tools are designed to test the performance of the user's CPU, read/write speeds of RAM and hard drives. We have used these tests to simulate a battery of applications and tasks, which will produce results we can compare to other systems using similar hardware.
The results of PCMark05 are very much in line with the gaming tests we ran. The Kuma-based Athlon X2 7850 has a clear advantage over the aging Brisbane core of the Athlon X2 4850e. However, it can't quite catch up to the similarly clocked Intel E7400.
Taking a closer look at CPU performance, we can see that in the single-threaded audio compression test, Intel has the upper hand. Even though the Athlon X2 7850 and Intel E7400 are matched at 2.8 GHz, the Intel chip is able to pull ahead. In the memory tests, we similar results, likely due to the lower memory write bandwidth of the X2 7850.
SPECperfview CATIA Tests
SPECviewperf is a portable OpenGL performance benchmark program written in C. It was developed by IBM. Later updates and significant contributions were made by SGI, Digital (Compaq, HP), 3Dlabs (Creative Labs) and other SPECopc project group members. SPECviewperf provides a vast amount of flexibility in benchmarking OpenGL performance. Currently, the program runs on most implementations of UNIX, Windows XP, Windows 2000, and Linux.
SPECviewperf parses command lines and data files, sets the rendering state, and converts data sets to a format that can be traversed using OpenGL rendering calls. It renders the data set for a pre-specified amount of time or number of frames with animation between frames. Finally, it outputs the results. SPECviewperf reports performance in frames per second. Other information about the system under test - all the rendering states, the time to build display lists (if applicable), and the data set used - are also output in a standardized report.
A "benchmark" using SPECviewperf is really a single invocation of SPECviewperf with command-line options telling the SPECviewperf program which data set to read in, which texture file to use, what OpenGL primitive to use to render the data set, which attributes to apply and how frequently, whether or not to use display lists, and so on. One quickly realizes that there are an infinite number of SPECviewperf "benchmarks" (an infinite number of data sets multiplied by an almost infinite number of command-line states).
Our final test, SPECviewperf CATIA, produces results similar to what we saw in the single-threaded PCMark05 audio compression benchmark. The Intel E7400 comes out on top; even besting the Intel Q9450 quad-core thanks to a higher clock speed. The Athlon X2 7850, on the other hand, comes in fourth place, but still manages to avoid last place.
AMD Athlon X2 Black Edition Final Thoughts
AMD roadmaps suggest that the Athlon X2 7850 BE will be the last Kuma-based processor to make it to market. The 65nm Stars microarchitecture is simply reaching its limit. Fortunately, 45nm dual core processors from AMD are right around the corner. Codenamed Regor, the new processors will have full AM3 support and should be capable of higher clock speeds and lower TDPs. After a few delays, the latest word is that these processor should be available some time in Q3 of this year.
Until then, however, the Kuma-based Athlons offer an incredible value. Our review sample of the Athlon X2 7850 easily outperformed the older Athlon X2 4850e. It even managed to best the Intel E7400 in a few tests, a processor that costs almost twice as much. Combined with an AM2+ motherboard and the recently launched Radeon HD 4770, the Athlon X2 7850 could form the core of a very competitive gaming system for only $300-$400.
Athlon X2 7850 BE Conclusion
While the Athlon X2 7850 Black Edition didn't top our performance charts, it did put up a decent fight. It's more than sufficient for a typical home or office PC, and will even function well in a gaming PC. More demanding users, though, may want to look into the Phenom II X3 series or Intel's high end Core 2 Duos.
In terms of construction quality, the Athlon X2 7850 BE was flawless. At stock voltage and frequencies it was perfectly stable, as any decent processor should be. It also stood up well to the excess voltage of our overclocking runs, although keep in mind damage caused by overclocking is not covered by warranty.
In addition to better performance per clock over the older Brisbane core, the Kuma based Athlon X2 7850 also has a few new features. The new memory controller supports up to DDR2-1066 and the HyperTransport bus has been increased 1800MHz. Additional instruction sets have also been added, as well as a nice helping of level 3 cache.
As this is a Black Edition processor, overclocking was as easy as changing the multiplier. With some added voltage, we were able to get the Athlon X2 7850 up to an impressive 3.4 GHz. The extra speed should help it compete against more expensive Core 2 Duos.
As of May 2009, prices at NewEgg hover around $69, which makes the Athlon X2 7850 Black Edition is an incredible value. It may not be the fastest processor around, but that wasn't AMD's intent. Instead they focused on performance per dollar, that is where the Athlon X2 7850 BE excels.
Pros:
+ Excellent price/performance ratio
+ AM2+ & DDR2-1066 support
+ Unlocked multiplier
+ 3MB of total cache
Cons:
- 95W TDP
Ratings:
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Performance: 8.5
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Construction: 9.25
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Functionality: 9.00
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Overclock: 9.25
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Value: 9.5
Final Score: 9.1 out of 10.
Excellence Achievement: Benchmark Reviews Golden Tachometer Award.
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