Phenom II X4 965 in Crysis, WinRAR, and Others
Crysis CPU BenchmarkCrysis has not exactly been friendly to AMD processors throughout its time on Earth, but little by little AMD has been creeping up on Intel in performance. This pre-recorded demo was run 4 times, with the lowest result thrown out and the rest averaged. Resolution is set to 1024×768 with High presets and no AA enabled.
Well, AMD has almost caught up with Intel in performance at its given pricepoint. About damn time.
WinRAR
The shareware 3.80 version was used in testing, and a 1.5 GB folder was compressed down to 250 MB.
WinRAR performance has always been a strength for AMD, and it continues to scale nicely with the clockspeed increases.
Euler3D
This benchmark is based off of a real simulation which explores airflow over an airfoil.
This application is very Intel friendly, but we are finally seeing the AMD parts get within striking distance of Intel’s Core 2 Quad series of parts.
Windows Media Encoder 9 64 Bit
This is another application that has been quite friendly to AMD for the past few years. This is also another free application, but with limited use. It is multi-threaded and leverages the extra cores to its advantage. I took a 250 MB 1080p wmv and converted it to a 45 MB 480p wmv.
The X4 965 comes out well ahead of the rest of the field. The extra clockspeed is nice, but also the low level BIOS improvements likely are helping it extend the lead.
Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance
While this game may be a bit old, it was still one of the first to be multi-thread aware. More cores have typically meant a smoother gameplay experience in SC:FA, and all that extra clockspeed doesn’t hurt either. Resolution was set to 1280×1024, high presets, no AA and 16X AF. The built-in benchmarking tool was used.
The 955 and 965 chips from AMD pull ahead of the Q9550. Gaming performance from AMD has been steadily improving since the release of the original Phenom, and the Phenom IIs with their combination of optimized design and a large L3 cache are very game friendly.
