AMD's Athlon II X3 435

AMD's Athlon II X3 435

3dsmax 9

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:

Compared to the Intel dual-core options, the Athlon II X3 435 is a definite winner here. It's got the core count and clock speed to beat the old Penryn derivatives. Its biggest competition comes from its own family, the Athlon II X4 620 is the better buy here.

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.

As I've been mentioning this entire time, the Athlon II X3 435 doesn't really sacrifice clock speed in its three-core configuration. At 2.9GHz even its single threaded performance is comparable to the Pentium E6300. Run a multithreaded app however and the performance goes from parity to leading:

POV-Ray 3.73 beta 23 Ray Tracing Performance

POV-Ray is a popular, open-source raytracing application that also doubles as a great tool to measure CPU floating point performance.

I ran the SMP benchmark in beta 23 of POV-Ray 3.73. The numbers reported are the final score in pixels per second.

The POV-Ray results echo what we've been seeing thus far, vs. Intel there's no contest - the 435 is the better value. Compared to the quad-core Athlon IIs however, the 435 isn't very good.

Blender 2.48a

Blender is an open source 3D modeling application. Our benchmark here simply times how long it takes to render a character that comes with the application.

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AMD's Athlon II X3 435

AMD's Athlon II X3 435

Fallout 3 Game Performance

Bethesda’s latest game uses an updated version of the Gamebryo engine (Oblivion). This benchmark takes place immediately outside Vault 101. The character walks away from the vault through the Springvale ruins. The benchmark is measured manually using FRAPS.
Finally! We have a test where the Athlon II X3 435's clock speed gives it the advantage over the 620. If you're a gamer but want more cores, the 435 is a good balance of performance in existing games but better than dual-core performance in well threaded apps.

Left 4 Dead

I've got no complaints about the X3's performance in Left 4 Dead either, it's nearly as fast as the more expensive Core 2 Duo E7500 (and with a much tastier upgrade path).

FarCry 2 Multithreaded Game Performance

FarCry 2 ships with the most impressive benchmark tool we’ve ever seen in a PC game. Part of this is due to the fact that Ubisoft actually tapped a number of hardware sites (AnandTech included) from around the world to aid in the planning for the benchmark.

For our purposes we ran the CPU benchmark included in the latest patch:

Even in our most heavily threaded game test, the X3 435 is a bit faster than the 620.

Crysis Warhead

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AMD's Athlon II X3 435

AMD's Athlon II X3 435

Power Consumption

Thanks to its higher clock speed the Athlon II X3 435 draws a little more power than the 620 at idle, but uses a little less under load. The new energy efficient chips can't be touched. Personally I wouldn't spring for them, but if you're looking to upgrade a building full of machines and want as much power reduction as possible the e series can deliver.

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