Synthetic Tests

Super Pi

Here is Super Pi on the Core i3-2150

And now the FX-8150 Phenom II.

Phenom II 970 X4 is way slower in this bench. We will see this again. Unless an application is heavily-threaded or optimized, it will run faster on the Core i3-2105.  Continue on to Fritz Chess Bench.

Fritz Chess Bench

Fritz Chess Benchmark is found within the game’s program files and basically it crunches numbers to test your processor’s speed. Deep Fritz takes advantage of massive calculations and multi-threaded performance to work any CPU fully. It loads all threads 100% and will drive your CPU temperatures way up.

Besides showing relative speed when compared to a P3 1.0GHz CPU, it also shows the nodes completed. The faster your CPU, the more nodes completed. First up is the i3

Next the Phenom II

Here in a multi-threaded benchmark, the Phenom II with its four cores is faster than the Core i3 with its 2 cores and two logical cores (HT).

CustomPC Benchmark

CustomPC benchmark use widely available open-source applications to carry out the tasks that most of us perform on a regular basis. There are three tests, each of which measure different aspects of a PC’s performance. These tests themselves are not synthetic benchmarks but instead they use real world image, video and multi-tasking tasks to test the performance of your computer.

The tests are:

• GIMP Image Editing
• H.264 Video Encoding
• Multi-tasking

As usual we test with the Core i3-2105 first.

Now the same tests are repeated on the Phenom II 970 X4.

Let’s compare the three benches side-by-side in a chart.

The Phenom II partly by virtue of being +400MHz faster and with 4 cores versus the Core i3-2105 with two with Hyper-Threading, scores slightly better in multi-tasking. However, clearly the Core i3-2105 is easily much faster in image editing and video encoding where the applications are not heavily multi-threaded.  Overall, this test is solidly in favor of the Intel architecture.  If you do video encoding or image editing, you will want Intel – even with two less cores.  The only hope that the Phenom II has of catching the stock i3 is to overclock – or if the application is heavily multi-threaded.

CINEBENCH

CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s professional 3D content creation suite, CINEMA 4D. This latest 11.5 version of CINEBENCH can test up to 64 processor threads accurately and automatically.

First up, the Core i7 with Intel HD 3000 Graphics

Now the i3-2105 with the GTX 580 and with HT enabled

In the above benchmark, Core i3’s HT is enabled. With it disabled, the CPU score is cut to 2.32 points while OpenGL remains the same. Now the Phenom II with the GTX 580:

The Phenom II is faster in the CPU test than the Core i3 by virtue of its 4 cores.

X264

Basically this test encodes a HD video clip into a x264 video file. The first pass is very quick and the second one is much slower and much more demanding of a task as it does the actual encoding. This benchmark is heavily mult-threaded and should favor more cores over HyperThreading.  First up is the i3-2105.

And now the Phenom Quad.

As we can see, both passes are quicker on the Phenom II.  It is far more important to have the second pass encode quickly as it is far more time-consuming. The first pass simply calculates and doesn’t use 4 cores whereas the second pass will use all 4 for the actual encoding. Here is another solid win for the quad-core Phenom II X-4 in a heavily-multi-threaded task.