AMD Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition Socket AM3 Triple Core Processor Review

Testing – Futuremark

The PCMark and 3DMark benchmarks test the entire system with the 3DMark series being more graphics intensive. As my X4 940 system uses XP as its operating system, I was unable to run PCMark Vantage or 3DMark Vantage, and I was unable to run PCMark05 on the X3 720 system because that program does not support Internet Explorer 8. (PCMark05 uses IE for page rendering and other tests) So I was unable to compare the X3 with the X4 in Futuremark testing in those tests. As my X4 rig uses a much less powerful video card than I have in the test rig, I saw no benefit in comparing the two rigs with 3DMark06.

pcmarkv

3dmark06

3dmarkv

Testing – PhotoShop

Next I ran a real world test using PhotoShop CS3 and PSBench by Driverheaven.net. PhotoShopBench consists of a script that runs a series of filters on a large .jpg, and you compare the times it takes to perform each filter operation. There are 15 steps, I chose a few of the longer ones, some operations take only a second or two, and really don’t show significant differences.

photoshop

Here in real world testing, the X4 outperformed the X3 at stock clock, but overclock the X3 and it is the clear winner in every test.

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