AMD Athlon II X4 Debut: Enter The $99 Quad-Core

AMD Athlon II X4 Debut: Enter The $99 Quad-Core PCMark Vantage

Next we ran a number of processor and platforms, including both of the new Athlon II X4 models, through Futuremark’s latest system performance metric built especially for Windows Vista, PCMark Vantage. PCMark Vantage runs through a host of different usage scenarios to simulate different types of workloads including High Definition TV and movie playback and manipulation, gaming, image editing and manipulation, music compression, communications, and productivity. Most of the tests are multi-threaded as well, so the tests can exploit the additional resources offered by a quad-core CPU.
The PCMark Vantage benchmark results are pleasantly surprising. Not only do both the new Athlon II X4's perform exceptionally well, but they keep right up with the more expensive Phenom II X3 720. The new quad-core Athlons also pull ahead of Intel's cheapest quad. Most surprising is the performance of the $99 2.6GHz 620, which competes favorably with the much more expensive Core 2 Quad Q8200.

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