High Performance Gaming on a Budget: Athlon II vs. Phenom II vs. Q9550S

Welcome to our Value series, part 3. This review covers the Benchmarks: Athlon II 250 X2 vs. Phenom II 550 X2 and 720 X3 vs. Q9550S, the third part of our “High Performance Gaming on a Budget” series of reviews, “Building a Value PC with Cooler Master”. 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. We want to see how close to our Intel PC’s performance that we can come, while building a completely new PC that is not only a competent gaming performer at 1920×1200, but one that won’t break our bank.

Our introduction, High Performance Gaming on a Budget: Building a Value PC with Cooler Master and Part One, Building a Value PC with Cooler Master’s Gladiator 600 Case, 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).

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! With smart shopping, minor substitutions and rebates, you can easily shave $50 off of our general prices. 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.  In that case, you are only spending from around $450 to a maximum of $600 for your new CPU,RAM, video card and motherboard.

We picked a Gigabyte CrossFire motherboard as we are going to explore AMD’s 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.  The purpose of overclocking is to see now, the future performance of our AMD CPUs.  In this way, this article should be relevant well into next year when AMD finally reaches near 4.0 GHz with their Phenom II.  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.

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’s maximum OC. To be completely fair in our benchmarking for both Intel and AMD platforms, we are benchmarking with two graphics cards each – Nvidia’s GTX 280 and ATi’s HD 4870-X2 and we are using identically configured PCs and identical hard drives in comparing them.

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. 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.

Our GPU reference cards are:

• GeForce GTX 280 1GB (602/1107) – it now costs about $250 and is the approximate performance equal of the popular choices, GTX 275 and HD 4890.
• HD 4870-X2 (750/900) which is very similar to 4870 CrossFire at stock speeds and it costs about $350 now.

Our reference CPUs are:

• Athlon II 250 X2 at 3.0 GHz and at 3.9 GHz ($70)*
• Phenom II 550 X2 at 3.1 GHz and at 3.9 GHz ($100)
• Phenom II 720 X3 at 2.8 GHz and at 3.5 GHz ($120)
• Q9550s at 2.83 GHz, 3.1 GHz and at 4.0 GHz ($250-$350)

We are paying particular attention to how the drivers have changed overall in relation to each other and we are also setting new benches for you with Cat 9-6 and GeForce 188.18 which you can directly compare with the same video cards – GTX 280 and HD 4870-X2 – that were tested in our Big GPU Shootout, Revisited, at the end of June with Catalyst 9-5 and Geforce 185.85. In fact, you can follow the driver progress of HD 4870-X2 vs. GTX 280 back for over a year through our series to when we first launched AlienBabelTech!

*Please note that our Athlon 250 X2 was supplied by AMD (our Phenom II 550/720 were purchased along with the Gigabyte motherboard and RAM from NewEgg.com) and this editor only had a very limited time to test it before sending it on to Karan for his own Value Platform Analysis article.  Even so, we can see the Athlon II architecture scaling compared with the Phenom II scaling with 4870-X2 or 4870 CrossFire.