Core i7 vs. Penryn vs. Phenom II with HD 4870-X2 & TriFire

This review concludes our “Performance Meets Value” series as we benchmark five CPU platforms with our HD 4870-X2 and HD 4870-X3 Tri-Fire. In part one of “Core i7 vs. Penryn vs. Phenom II” which we published here in November, we used our GTX 280 and the HD 4870-X2 to benchmark our new Intel’s Core i7 920 processor against the Phenom II 720 X3 and also against our Q9550S at speeds up to 4.0 GHz.

This time, besides testing with Q9550s, Core i7 920 and Phenom II 720 X3, we are expanding our review to include AMD’s 955 X4 and 550 X2. That means that we are now benchmarking with five CPUs at three clockspeeds each. Our November review used Catalyst 9-9 with our HD 4870-X2, so now we are benchmarking with Catalyst 9-10 so that you can make some comparisons between the two Catalyst driver releases. In over a month of solid benchmarking – literally thousands of individual benchmark runs which we have gathered, analyzed and charted for you – we now have some solid evidence which finally answers the question as to what kind of CPU is needed for really fast graphics.

We are testing all of our CPU platforms with our HD 4870-X2 and HD 4870-X3 TriFire as the fastest graphics available to us. Our HD 4870-X2’s performance is very representative of the new HD 5870’s performance as well as the performance of HD 4870 CrossFire. By testing with HD 4870-X3 Tri-Fire, we can be certain that our performance levels will at least match this coming generation’s fastest single Fermi GPU (GF-100) as well as any AMD 5870 refreshes this year so as to be useful to our readers in deciding which CPU to pair with a fast graphics card. We always test at 1680×1050 and 1920×1200 resolutions and always with maxed out DX10 settings whenever possible and always with 4xAA/16xAF applied.

For our new testing in this review, we are now benching with Catalyst 9-10. This time, we will now use our brand-new highest performing Phenom II, 955 X4 in addition to 720 X3 and 550 X2 so as to test AMD quad-, tri- and dual-core CPUs. We will test them against our Q9550S and our new Core i7 920 that we purchased from NewEgg.com together with a Gigabyte EX58-UD3R motherboard and 2×2 GB Kingston DDR3 PC18000. We added it to the 1×2 GB for tri-channel that we got from Kingston earlier this year which Karan tested. He found it to be extremely fast and stable in his review here. So now we have the highest performing and rather expensive Intel Core i7 system to set alongside their now midrange Penryn Q9550S and also to compare with the decidedly value AMD Phenom II X3. We will test performance at each CPU’s stock clock, 3.5 GHz for a clock-to-clock comparison, and at each CPU’s maximum overclock which turned out to be between 3.8 and 4.0 GHz. We are confident that our overclocked CPUs will easily match the performance in gaming of anything that AMD or Intel will release this year.

When we say “performance meets value”, we mean that the Core i7 X58 motherboard is almost double the price of its Phenom II counterpart, the entry-level i7 920 CPU itself is almost $100 more expensive than AMD’s flagship quad processor and the tri-channel DDR3 RAM is also more than double what one would pay for memory for the AMD DDR2 platform. We will also note that the AMD motherboard’s PCIe graphics bandwidth is limited to 8X + 8X which his half the PCIe bandwidth of the Intel motherboard. So we naturally ask, “is it worth it” even for really fast graphics?

Please continue on to the next page for the complete hardware and software setup of our three platforms – AMD’s Phenom II versus Intel’s Penryn versus Core i7. We shall see what happens when high performance finally meets value in PC gaming with fast graphics.