{"id":10085,"date":"2009-08-16T07:19:43","date_gmt":"2009-08-16T07:19:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/?p=10085"},"modified":"2009-08-18T21:24:53","modified_gmt":"2009-08-18T21:24:53","slug":"high-performance-gaming-on-a-budget-athlon-ii-vs-phenom-ii-vs-q9550s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/high-performance-gaming-on-a-budget-athlon-ii-vs-phenom-ii-vs-q9550s\/","title":{"rendered":"High Performance Gaming on a Budget: Athlon II vs. Phenom II vs. Q9550S"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome to our Value<\/em> series, part 3. This review covers the Benchmarks: Athlon II 250 X2 vs. Phenom II 550 X2 and 720 X3 vs. Q9550S,<\/em> the third part of our “High Performance Gaming on a Budget” series of reviews, “Building a Value PC with Cooler Master”. <\/span>We are currently deep into a world-wide financial recession, and although most gamers would love to upgrade regularly and have Tri-Fire or SLi graphics systems powered by the most expensive overclocked quad core CPU to play their DX10 PC games, most of us must be practical. For the first time, we are going to be dealing with the word, BUDGET<\/em>. We want to see how close to our Intel PC\u2019s performance that we can come, while building a completely new PC that is not only a competent gaming performer at 1920\u00d71200, but one that won\u2019t break our bank. <\/span><\/p>\n

Our introduction, High Performance Gaming on a Budget: Building a Value PC with Cooler Master<\/a> <\/span>and Part One, Building a Value PC with Cooler Master\u2019s Gladiator 600 Case<\/a>, were both published last week. So far, we got a handsome PC in a nicely cooled Cooler Master Gladiator 600 case ($70), a quality CPU cooler Hyper N212 ($30;to be reviewed next week) and a solid Silent Power 600 watt power supply unit (PSU; $100) that will handle a multi-core CPU and CrossFire as well as a 8X+8X PCIe CrossFire motherboard ($100) and 2×2 GB PC 8500 ($50). <\/span><\/p>\n

Our AMD value CPUs will range from $70 to $120 and we will pick two video cards ranging from $250 to $350 for a grand total of about $700 to $800, depending on our choice of video card, GTX 280 or HD4870-X2 – the single most expensive component by far! <\/span>With smart shopping, minor substitutions and rebates, you can easily shave $50 off of our general prices. <\/span>We expect that you are probably upgrading from your current PC and will migrate your keyboard, mouse, optical drives, hard drives, LCD and operating system to your new build. If your PSU, case and CPU cooler are already up to the task, you can save another $200 off of our $650 to $800 total hypothetical budget that we are budgeting for these four items.\u00a0 In that case, you are only spending from around $450 to a maximum of $600 for your new CPU,RAM, video card<\/span> and motherboard<\/span>.<\/span>
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We picked a Gigabyte CrossFire motherboard as we are going to explore AMD\u2019s value CPU choices and want to have an upgrade path for an ATi graphics card as they are frequently CrossFired as a bang-for-buck solution to hold off on buying a new generation of video card. We will also examine the stock and overclocked gaming performance of the Athlon II 250 X2 vs. the Phenom II 550 X2 vs. Phenom II 720 X3.\u00a0 The purpose of overclocking is to see now, the future performance of our AMD CPUs.\u00a0 In this way, this article should be relevant well into next year when AMD finally reaches near 4.0 GHz with their Phenom II.\u00a0 Certainly Q9550 will get no faster and Intel will depend on its soon-to-be-released Core i3\/i5 to provide their value segment which we intend to explore next.<\/span><\/p>\n

We will match our new AMD gaming builds against our current maxed out, and much more expensive, Intel Penryn Core2Quad system, Q9550s at 2.83 GHz, 3.1 GHz and 4.0 GHz. Of course, we will compare our new AMD CPUs at their stock clocks and then at each CPU\u2019s maximum OC. To be completely fair in our benchmarking for both Intel and AMD platforms, we are benchmarking with two graphics cards each – Nvidia\u2019s GTX 280 and ATi\u2019s HD 4870-X2 and we are using identically configured PCs and identical hard drives in comparing them.<\/span><\/p>\n

We are using Catalyst 9-6 and GeForce 186.18 for this review; final certified drivers are used for all of our testing all through our review series. Identical 250 GB hard drives are set up with the latest version of Vista 64; each with identical programs, updates and patches – the only differences are the CPUs and the motherboards required for their respective AMD and Intel platforms. Of course, two video cards are compared on each platform so we can judge the effect each different CPU – at stock and at maximum overclock – has on gaming performance. <\/span>We are continuing to test at two of the most popular demanding wide-screen resolutions, 1680×1050 and 1920×1200, 4xAA plus 16xAF and with maximum DX10 details whenever it is available. And we are looking to do this all on a budget.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Our GPU reference cards are:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n