Testbed and Methods

As the new Phenom II series processors do not differ from their predecessors in anything but clock rate, we are not going to carry out a detailed comparison of their performance with Intel’s products. We just took four similarly priced LGA1156 processors: a quad-core Core i7-860 and a quad-core Core i5-760 (the former is more and the latter is less expensive than the Phenom II X6 1075T), a dual-core Core i5-650 (competes with the Phenom II X4 970) and a Core i3-540 (comparable to the Phenom II X2 560 in price).

Here is a full list of hardware components we used for our tests:

• Processors:
  • AMD Phenom II X6 1075T (Thuban, 6 cores/6 threads, 3.0 GHz, 6 MB L3)
  • AMD Phenom II X4 970 (Deneb, 4 cores/4 threads, 3.5 GHz, 6 MB L3)
  • AMD Phenom II X2 560 (Calisto, 2 cores/2 threads, 3.3 GHz, 6 MB L3)
  • Intel Core i7-860 (Lynnfield, 4 cores/8 threads, 2.8 GHz, 8 MB L3)
  • Intel Core i5-760 (Lynnfield, 4 cores/4 threads, 2.8 GHz, 8 MB L3)
  • Intel Core i5-650 (Clarkdale, 2 cores/4 threads, 3.2 GHz, 4 MB L3)
  • Intel Core i3-530 (Clarkdale, 2 cores/4 threads, 2.93 GHz, 4 MB L3)
• CPU cooler: Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme with an Enermax Everest fan
• Mainboards:
  • ASUS Crosshair IV Formula (Socket AM3, AMD 890FX + SB850, DDR3 SDRAM)
  • ASUS P7P55D Premium (LGA1156, Intel P55 Express)
• System memory:  2 x 2 GB, DDR3-1600 SDRAM, 9-9-9-24 (Kingston KHX1600C8D3K2/4GX)
• Graphics card: ATI Radeon HD 5870
• Hard disk drive: Kingston SNVP325-S2/128GB
• Power supply: Tagan TG880-U33II (880 W)
• Operating system: Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate x64
• Drivers:
  • Intel Chipset Driver 9.1.1.1025
  • ATI Catalyst 10.9 Display Driver

The Core i5-760, Core i5-650 and Core i3-530 do not support DDR-1600, so we used them with DDR3-1333 at timings of 9-9-9-27.