AMD Phenom II X4 975 Black Edition Review – overclocking performance

Before we head into our result testing of the AMD X4 975  Black Edition we felt it was important to get baseline results from a couple of processors.

Firstly we selected the Phenom II X6 1055T – the bargain, value for money 6 core processor that has sold exceptionally well for AMD in 2010. In the past we showed you how to get a 900mhz overclock from this CPU with minimal effort, so it makes for a great value for money purchase, especially for people on a budget but who want multiple processing power for rendering and encoding. This CPU is selling right now for £150 inc vat, meaning it really is still one of the best bargains out there. This costs around the same price as the X4 975 Black Edition, but has two extra cores and runs 800mhz slower.

Secondly, we selected the Intel Core i5 760 processor, the replacement for the Core i5 750 of yesterday. This processor is priced at £145 in the UK right now and is Intel's direct Quad core competitor to the X4 975. It isn't an unlocked processor however, but 4ghz+ is easy enough with the right motherboard.

We also include some reference base results with the Core i5 655k, Intel's unlocked CPU which didn't prove to be a great seller. It ticks over at 3.2ghz and can achieve massive overclocks (just under 5ghz), and costs around £190 inc vat although it has been recently discontinued. This is a dual core design with hyperthreading (2 physical + 2 logical).

While we could use a variety of testing today, we settled on a total of five suites, to give a good cross section of overall processing power.

Test One:

SiSoftware Sandra is a great indication of potential performance levels, we are going to take results from the Arithmetic, Multimedia and Cryptography benchmarks. We particularly like the Crypography test as it is major part of computing. Certain processes can prove slower than others, depending on their algorithms. User passwords on your home PC are encrypted, as are user passwords on web servers. Past that, cryptography is used in other areas as well, such as with creating of unbreakable locks on files or assigning a hash to a particular file (like MD5).

In Sandra’s Cryptography test, the results are outputted as MB/s, higher being better. The higher the number, the faster the CPU processes through the respective algorithm.

Test Two:

Cinebench R11.5 64 bit is a particular favourite of ours, as it is a borderline ‘synthetic’ application. Certainly it is a scripted benchmark, however it is based on the fantastic CINEMA 4D rendering engine, which is used by many studios and production companies worldwide for 3D content creation. You might not know, but this software was used in the creation of movies such as Star Wars, Spider man and the Chronicles Of Narnia.

Test Three:

Video Encoding: Cyberlink Media Espresso 6. We love this program at Kitguru, not only is it a great indication of how fast a processor can handle video encoding, but it also now supports video card acceleration. This means you can see just how much time you are saving if you get your graphics card to support the processor. Today we are disabling the graphics card element of the encoding process, to focus completely on the AMD and Intel Solutions.

Test Four:

Rendering: 3D Studio Max 2011. This is another professional level software package that offers uses integrated 3D modeling, animation, rendering, and compositing capabilities. It delivers differentiated experiences and specialized toolsets for game developers, visual effects artists, and graphic designers on the one hand, and architects, designers, engineers, and visualization specialists on the other. We render a customised Kitguru scene at 3000×2500 and record the time taken, lower is better.

Test Five:

PC Mark Vantage. This PC benchmark suite is designed for Windows and offers one-click simplicity for casual users and detailed, professional grade testing for industry, press and enthusiasts. A PCMark score is a measure of your computer’s performance across a variety of common tasks such as viewing and editing photos, video, music and other media, gaming, communications, productivity and security.

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