AMD Athlon II and Phenom II X2 Processors Debut

How We Configured Our Test Systems: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set memory timings for either DDR2-1066 with 5,5,5,15 timings or DDR3-1333 with 7,7,7,20 timings. The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows Vista Ultimate was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.

HotHardware's Test Systems  Intel and AMD - Head To Head

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2009  Synthetic Benchmarks

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA XII, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2009 suite with AMD's new Phenom II X2 and Athlon II X2 processors (CPU Arithmetic, CPU Multimedia, Memory Bandwidth, and Cache and Memory).  All of the scores reported below were taken with the processors running at their default clock speeds of 3.1GHz and 3.0GHz, respectively, with 4GB of DDR3-1333 RAM running in unganged mode.

To prevent the page from getting too cluttered with SANDRA charts, we've run these tests only on AMD's "new" processors being released today, the dual-core Athlon II X2 and Phenom II X2. The other Phenom II X3 and X4 processors hitting the scene are simply clocked differently than previous offerings.

There is a 100MHz clock speed disparity between the Athlon II X2 250 and Phenom II X2 550 we've tested here, but they perform similarly in the four SANDRA tests we ran. The Athlon II actually pulls ahead of the higher clocked Phenom in the CPU ALU benchmark, but the Phenom II X2 comes right back to take the lead in the FPU test. In the Integer and FP portions of the Multi-Media test, the Phenom II holds onto a small lead, but in the memory bandwidth test both processors put up nearly identical scores of just over 10GB/s. And finally, in the combined cache and memory bandwidth test, the Phenom II X2 550 pulls ahead by about 1.3GB/s of total bandwidth.