AMD Value Platform Analysis Part 3:Athlon II X2 250 vs Phenom II X2 550

In the last part we took a look at the kind of performance you can expect from AMD’s value platform consisting of an Athlon II X2 250 processor paired with a GIGABYTE MA-770T UD3P motherboard and a ATI Radeon HD 4650 graphic card. To give you a broad range of performance results, I changed the video cards and tested with HD 4770, HD 4870 and HD 4890. In this part of the series, I will be changing the CPU to Phenom II X2 550 and we will see how this change in CPU affects the performance.

Let’s take a look at the architectural comparison between the Athlon II X2 and the Phenom II X2. Pay close attention to the last column. The Phenom II lineup carries a little more than 3 times the number of transistors than the Athlon II X2 lineup. This is due to the addition of 6MB L3 cache on the Phenom II lineup. However, Athlon II has an advantage over the Phenom II when you compare the L2 cache per core. In this review we are going to look at how the difference in L2 and L3 caches differentiates the two CPUs.

In this part, I will be testing the following configurations as far as the gaming tests go:

• AMD Phenom II X2 550 @3.0 GHz    +  HD 4650 512MB GDDR3 600/667 MHz   @ 1280×1024 (Underclocked Configuration to match Athlon II X2 250 clockspeed)
• AMD Phenom II X2 550 @3.1 Ghz     +  HD 4650 512MB GDDR3 600/667 MHz   @ 1280×1024 (Stock Configuration)
• AMD Phenom II X2 550 @ 3.89 GHz +  HD 4650 512MB GDDR3 770/955 MHz   @ 1280×1024 (Overclocked Configuration)
• AMD Phenom II X2 550 @3.0 GHz    +  HD 4770 512MB GDDR5 750/800 MHz   @ 1280×1024
• AMD Phenom II X2 550 @3.0 GHz    +  HD 4870 512MB GDDR5 750/900 MHz   @ 1280×1024 & 1920×1200
• AMD Phenom II X2 550 @3.0 GHz    +  HD 4890 1GB     GDDR5 925/1050 MHz @ 1280×1024 & 1920×1200 (HD 4890 is Diamond XOC version)

Test System

• AMD Phenom II X2 550 CPU
• AMD Athlon II X2 250 CPU
• GIGABYTE MA770-UD3P Motherboard
• Crucial 4 GB (2×2 GB) DDR3 1333 MHz Kit
• WD 250AAKS 250GB Hard Disk
• ATI Radeon HD 4650 Video Card
• ATI Radeon HD 4770Video Card
• ATI Radeon HD 4870 Video Card
• ATI Radeon HD 4890 Video Card
• Zerotherm Nirvana 120mm CPU Cooler
• Catalyst Software Suite 9.7 used (All settings at default)