AMD is usually pretty aggressive with turning process tweaks and yield improvements into new products. Just two months ago AMD gave us the Athlon II X3 450 and the Phenom II X2 565, today we're getting speed bumps of both of those parts. The Athlon II X3 455 runs at 3.3GHz, up from 3.2GHz and costs the same $87. You get an additional 100MHz for free. The chip hasn't changed otherwise. You get a quad-core die with one core disabled, no L3 cache and a 512KB L2 per core.

At $87 this part competes head to head with Intel's Pentium G6950. The Athlon II X3 450 mopped the floor with the G6950 in our last review, and the speed bumped 455 will be no different in this review. If you CPU budget is right around the $80 - $90 mark, AMD has you covered.

The Phenom II X2 565 is an unlocked Black Edition part, also identical to its predecessors. Here you have a quad-core die with two cores disabled, a 512KB L2 per core and a shared 6MB L3. The 565 runs at 3.4GHz, up from 3.3GHz, but the clock increase comes with a $10 price increase.

The 565 goes up against Intel's Core i3 540 and 550 processors. The comparison here is less clear cut. In the case of the Athlon II X3, you get more cores for the same money which really helps AMD out. The 565 by default doesn't give you any more cores, all you get is a higher clock speed and a larger L3 cache. But you lose out on IPC, threaded performance and power consumption. While AMD easily wins between $80 - $90, around $110 - $120 the choice moves back towards Intel. There is just one more thing however.

Both the Athlon II X3 and Phenom II X2 are made from harvested die. As we've seen in the past, these harvested die aren't always bad. In the case of the Phenom II X2 we've seen a number of CPUs with disabled cores that could just as easily be re-enabled. Armed with ASUS' M4A89GTD Pro/USB 3 890GX motherboard I tried to see if I could enable any of the disabled cores on the two samples AMD sent me.

In the case of the Athlon II X3, enabling the fourth core wasn't a problem. ASUS' Core Unlocker enabled it and the system was just as stable as before, now with four fully functional cores. I could even overclock the four cores just as far as I could overclock the chip with only three cores enabled.

I managed to get three working cores on the Phenom II X2, however I couldn't boot into Windows 7 with the fourth core enabled.

A Phenom II X2 565: Overclocked and with one additional core unlocked

In the case of the $87 Athlon II X3 turning into an $87 Athlon II X4, you can't get better than that. Your mileage will most definitely vary. I've had Phenom II X2s that would work as quad core parts, triple core parts and refuse to work at all above two cores. The same goes for the Athlon II line. You can't count on core unlocking working, but if it does, it's great additional value.

The Phenom II X6 1100T

The six-core Phenom II X6 gets a speed bump as well. The 1100T increases default clock speeds from 3.2GHz to 3.3GHz, and increases Turbo Core frequency from 3.6GHz to 3.7GHz. Turbo Core is only supported on Thuban based processors (currently only Phenom II X6s) and increases operating frequency if half or fewer cores are actively in use.

The bigger news here is the 1100T reflects AMD's new Phenom II X6 pricing:

At $265 this puts the 1100T between the Core i5 760 and the Core i7 860. While the Core i7 860 still has the edge in some of our tests, the 1100T is within striking distance and cheaper. In heavily threaded apps, the 1100T's six cores really come in handy and give AMD the win. Combine the two and you can get a better value. However Intel still holds the advantage in lightly threaded scenarios thanks to the i5/i7 aggressive turbo modes.

The Test

To keep the review length manageable we're presenting a subset of our results here. For all benchmark results and even more comparisons be sure to use our performance comparison tool: Bench.

We've moved all of our AMD CPU testing to the 890GX platform. While nearly all numbers are comparable you may occasionally see some scaling that doesn't quite add up compared to lower clocked versions of the same chips running on a previous motherboard.

SYSMark 2007 Performance

Our journey starts with SYSMark 2007, the only all-encompassing performance suite in our review today. The idea here is simple: one benchmark to indicate the overall performance of your machine.

SYSMark 2007 is getting very long in the tooth and we're still another couple of quarters away from an updated version for 2011. That being said, it does function as a good representation of lightly threaded application performance. There's little to gain from moving to four cores here and basically nothing to be seen from the move to six cores. The Phenom II X6 1100T is within several percent of the performance of its Core i5/i7 competitors.

The lack of an L3 cache holds the Athlon II back, which is made evident by the solid performance increase seen by the 565 BE. Both of these parts are around 10% off of their competitive performance targets.

Adobe Photoshop CS4 Performance

To measure performance under Photoshop CS4 we turn to the Retouch Artists’ Speed Test. The test does basic photo editing; there are a couple of color space conversions, many layer creations, color curve adjustment, image and canvas size adjustment, unsharp mask, and finally a gaussian blur performed on the entire image.

The whole process is timed and thanks to the use of Intel's X25-M SSD as our test bed hard drive, performance is far more predictable than back when we used to test on mechanical disks.

Time is reported in seconds and the lower numbers mean better performance. The test is multithreaded and can hit all four cores in a quad-core machine.

In our Photoshop CS4 test, AMD has effectively equalled the performance of the Core i5 with the Phenom II X6 1100T. The i7 860 is a bit faster but the i5 comparison is very close. The Athlon II X3 455 is 15% faster than its closest competitor, the Pentium G6950. The Phenom II X2 565 BE doesn't get many points for its large cache, it's the third core that puts the Athlon II X3 ahead here.

3dsmax 9 - SPECapc 3dsmax CPU Rendering Test

Today's desktop processors are more than fast enough to do professional level 3D rendering at home. To look at performance under 3dsmax we ran the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 benchmark (only the CPU rendering tests) under 3dsmax 9 SP1. The results reported are the rendering composite scores.

This is the closest we've ever seen the Phenom II X6 to Intel's Core i7 series. Here the 860 is a bit faster but it's also more expensive, the 1100T is a good fit here. The Athlon II X3 455 is 16% faster than its closest competitor, while the Phenom II X2 565 BE falls behind its target. This is very similar to what we reported a couple of months ago, the Athlon II X3 is a great value while the Phenom II X2 makes sense only if you can unlock at least one of its cores.

Cinebench R10

Created by the Cinema 4D folks we have Cinebench, a popular 3D rendering benchmark that gives us both single and multi-threaded 3D rendering results.

Single threaded performance is an advantage the i5/i7s have over the Phenom II X6s, however thanks to the high turbo core speed of the 1100T the gap isn't huge. The Athlon II X3 trails the G6950 here as its core advantage is useless in a single threaded application.

Turn up the threads and there's no beating the Phenom II X6 and Athlon II X3, they both do much better than their intended competition.

I've started running Cinebench 11.5 in preparation for an update to Bench, some of the initial results are below:

The Phenom II X6 1100T and Athlon II X3 do very well once again.

x264 HD Video Encoding Performance

Graysky's x264 HD test uses x264 to encode a 4Mbps 720p MPEG-2 source. The focus here is on quality rather than speed, thus the benchmark uses a 2-pass encode and reports the average frame rate in each pass.

Video encoding and other thread heavy tasks are best suited for AMD's more-is-better core strategy. You get six cores on the 1100T and three with the 455, in both cases the competing Intel part doesn't stand a chance. In the second encoding pass the Athlon II X3 is over 30% faster than the Pentium G6950. Without unlocking additional cores, the Phenom II X2 565 BE doesn't impress here.

PAR2 Multithreaded Archive Recovery Performance

Par2 is an application used for reconstructing downloaded archives. It can generate parity data from a given archive and later use it to recover the archive

Chuchusoft took the source code of par2cmdline 0.4 and parallelized it using Intel’s Threading Building Blocks 2.1. The result is a version of par2cmdline that can spawn multiple threads to repair par2 archives. For this test we took a 708MB archive, corrupted nearly 60MB of it, and used the multithreaded par2cmdline to recover it. The scores reported are the repair and recover time in seconds.

The Phenom II X6 is competitive in our Par2 test, the Athlon II X3 455 is significantly faster than the Pentium G6950 and the Phenom II X2 565 falls short of its target. Rinse and repeat.

7-Zip Benchmark Performance

Included in 7-zip is a pure algorithm test that completely removes IO from the equation. This test scales with core count and as a result we get a good theoretical picture of how these chips perform. Note that the actual 7-zip compression/decompression process is limited to 2 threads so there's no real world advantage to having more cores.

Gaming Performance

When it comes to pure CPU bound gaming performance in three of our benchmarks the Core i5/i7s have the advantage over the Phenom II X6 1100T, however the latter is very competitive in Starcraft 2. The Athlon II X3 455 is a knockout compared to the Pentium G6950. Unlike many of the other benchmarks, the Phenom II X2 565 BE does very well in our gaming tests vs. the Core i3.

Power Consumption

With the exception of the Phenom II X6, the AMD options are very competitive when it comes to power consumption. The Athlon II X3 barely uses any more power than the Core i5 and uses less power than the Pentium G6950.

Under load, Intel has the advantage as the Pentium G6950 and Core i3s are built on a 32nm process. The quad-core i5/i7s draw less power but they also deliver lower performance than the 1100T.

Overclocking

All three chips here are easily overclockable. The Phenom II X6 1100T could hit 4GHz however not stable enough to make it through our test suite with stock cooling. I ended up at 3.89GHz for the 1100T:

The Athlon II X3 455 proved to be even more potent than the 450 sample I tested last time. I managed a 3.85GHz overclock out of this one:

The 3.85GHz overclock held even when I enabled the chip's disabled 4th core.

Finally the Phenom II X2 565 BE hit an impressive 3.92GHz even with a third core enabled:

While overclocked the best value continues to be the Athlon II X3 455 which now performs like a Clarkdale Core i5. Unlock the fourth core and the Athlon II X3 455 is faster than a Lynnfield Core i5 in threaded applications:

You do pay the price in power consumption, the added voltage necessary to reach these higher clock speeds manifests in much higher power consumption. Such is the tradeoff with most voltage overclocking:

Final Words

As a speed bump, today's launch doesn't really change anything. The Athlon II X3 455 continues to be the best buy at under $90, picking up where the 450 left off. Intel hasn't updated the Pentium G6950 since its release nor has it dropped the price of the Core i3 530, leaving AMD with a much better option across the board. If you are lucky enough to get a fourth working core on your X3, well, you can't get better than that.

The Phenom II X6 1100T at $265 is near the sweet spot for price/performance, and I'd say the 1090T at $235 is probably right at it. In many cases you get Lynnfield-like performance and in heavily threaded apps there's no comparison. Single threaded performance is still an Intel advantage, however the gap is narrowing. When the Phenom II X6 launched its price limited it to those users who needed tons of threads, the recent price drops have expanded its appeal.

The Phenom II X2 565 BE is interesting only as a potential triple or quad-core part. Unfortunately it's a risky proposition. Our 565 BE sample only had one functional albeit disabled core, the fourth core was pretty much dead. If you can get a part with four working cores, the 565 BE is a great value. Even with three working cores it's good, but neither of these two outcomes is guaranteed.

I'd say that's the wrapup in order of success. The Athlon II X3 is an easy win, the Phenom II X6 ranges from competitive with Lynnfield to a great value and the Phenom II X2 is a nice chip to tweak but uninspired at stock.