AMD Value Platform Analyzed Part 1

[wolf2009]

While Intel has been the dominant force in the PC industry and has made good use of their position by offering CPUs with unlocked multipliers and charging $1000 or more for them, AMD has always buzzed with the keyword “Value” with everything they sell; be it their recent success with the keyword “Value” in the video card arena, or their CPUs over the years. They have tried to sell their CPUs at lower prices than Intel when they are not able to offer the performance levels of Intel CPUs in order to gain the business of their customer. Their recent success with the Phenom II lineup has been due to extreme overclockability due to unlocked multipliers of the Black Edition CPUs and the low cost of their platform overall.

Today we won’t be looking at their quad core lineup, but at a “value” PC in every sense. Although this PC won’t be able to do any high-resolution gaming, it should be able to offer decent performance at 1280×1024 resolution with most of the games ever released for PC. The games have been chosen carefully to represent some of the most graphically intensive games currently available. This PC is far from being a “Crysis” beater so Crysis is not chosen for this analysis.

Interesting ending

I would like to end this article with a glimpse of what’s in store in future parts of this series.


I will be testing the Athlon II at stock with a HD 4650 in 6 games and with 11 synthetic benchmarks. Then, we will overclock the Athlon II and HD 4650 and retest all those benchmarks. Then the GPU gets upgraded to HD 4770 and all the games and synthetic tests are rerun. The GPU gets upgraded again to HD 4870 512 MB and finally to HD 4890 1 GB. The 4870 and 4890 will also be tested at 1920x1200 resolution. This will provide an accurate representation of the numbers you can expect from this platform with a low-end GPU and a high end one. Later in this series I will be upgrading the CPU to Phenom II X2 550, then to Phenom II X3 720 and hopefully rounding the series off with Phenom II X4 Quad Core to see how the numbers change with the change in hardware.


Now when I say that this board is no pushover when it comes to overclocking, believe me. I would like to leave you with two screens as a testament to what this board and platform can do and something you can look forward to for our next part.

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