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Review: Cheap as chips
This review is also available in German.
After walking in Lynnfield land, AMD struck back with the heavily delayed AMD Propus dice. This is AMD's first quad-core CPU retailing with a price below $100 or €80 on launch date. Meanwhile this is not the only quad-core at such a low price-level, the old Phenom 9650 is available at the same price with a tad lower clock but with 2MB L3 cache.
We got the AMD Athlon II 620 which is the only interesting of the Propus offerings. AMD also introduced the Athlon II 630 but the 200MHz speed bump costs you at least a 22% price-premium. The 620 is clocked with 2.60GHz and offers the same features as any Phenom II except the L3 cache. You get 512kB 2nd level cache and 64kB L1 caches for instructions and data per core. For a better comparison we have also included the old Phenom 9600/9650 in our benches to see which offering is the better one for you.
Testbed:
Motherboard:
MSI P55-GD80 (provided by MSI)
Intel P55
MSI 790GX-GD70 (provided by MSI)
AMD 790GX/SB750
MSI DKA790GX (provided by MSI)
AMD 790GX/SB750
Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P (provided by Gigabyte)
Intel P45/iCH10R
Intel DX58SO "Smackover" (provided by Intel)
Intel X58/iCH10R
CPU:
Intel Core i5 750 (provided by Intel)
Intel Core i5 870 (provided by Intel)
AMD Athlon II X4 620 (provided by AMD)
AMD Phenom 9650 (provided by AMD)
AMD Phenom II 810 (provided by AMD)
AMD Phenom II 905e (provided by AMD)
AMD Phenom II 955 Black Edition (provided by AMD)
AMD Phenom II 965 Black Edition (provided by AMD)
Intel Q9450 (provided by Intel)
Intel Q(X)9650 (provided by Intel)
Intel Core i7 920 (provided by Intel)
Intel Core i7 975XE (provided by Intel)
CPU-Cooler:
Scythe Kabuto (provided by Scythe-Europe) for AMD and Intel E/Q
Thermalright Ultra 120 eXtreme 1366 (provided by Thermalright) for Intel 1366
Thermalright MUX-120 1156 (provided by Thermalright) for Intel 1156
Memory:
Kingston 2GB Kit PC2-9600U KHX1200D2K2/2G (provided by Kingston)
1066MHz CL5-5-5-15 CR2T at 1.90V for AMD DDR2
Qimonda 3GB Kit PC3-8500U (provided by Qimonda)
1066MHz CL7-7-7-20 CR1T at 1.55V for Intel i7
Kingston 3GB Kit PC3-10600U KHX1600D3K3/2GX (provided by Kingston)
1333MHz CL7-7-7-20 CR1T at 1.50V for AMD DDR3 and Intel P55
1440MHz CL7-7-7-20 CR1T at 1.50V for Intel P55
1600MHz CL8-8-8-23 CR1T at 1.60V for AMD DDR3 FSB overclocking
1644MHz CL9-8-8-23 CR1T at 1.60V for Intel P55
1800MHz CL9-8-8-23 CR1T at 1.65V for Intel P55
Graphics Card:
MSI R4850-2D1G-OC (provided by MSI)
Power supply:
PC Power & Cooling Silencer 500W (provided by PC Power & Cooling)
Hard disk:
Samsung F1 1000GB (provided by Ditech)
Case fans:
SilenX iXtrema Pro 14dB(A) (provided by PC-Cooling.at)
Scythe DFS122512LS
Case:
Cooler Master Stacker 831 Lite (provided by Cooler Master)
OS:
Since we are still not fans of Vista, all tests are performed with XP SP3. As 64-bit software is still not very common, we stick with the 32-bit version.
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