Introducing the New Phenom II 980 BE vs. Core i7-920 – value meets performance again

3DMark11

3DMark11 is Futuremark’s brand new DX11-only benchmark. We are keeping track of the overall (for these tests, meaningless) scores and the framerates of the 4 graphics tests (which are more meaningful). First the basic tests results.

We note the rankings. Unfortunately, scores are completely meaningless when they are presented in this way. However, the next set of tests actually measures framerates of four short timedemos that focus on DX11 graphics performance.

We see an interesting lineup with a lot of uniformity. Unfortunately for our purposes, 3DMark11 scores are just as meaningless as Vantage is in an attempt to compare one CPU’s performance to another – even in the same system.  It again proves, however, that the two Phenom II X4s give identical performance at the same clock speeds.

Let’s move on to PC games and to real world situations and we will create our snapshot of the current performance of the new Phenom II X4 980 BE in an attempt to determine its price to performance and how it fits in the current line up and especially how well it does against the Core i7-920 at the same clock speeds.