The sale of platforms vs individual components have been things that both AMD and INTEL have played with. INTEL had some early success with their Centrino mobile platform, and caused such a stir amongst mobile users that people started to ask for “Centrino powered” laptops by name, regardless of how many other models and brands were available with the exact same functionality. A success that their Viiv platform never seemed to follow up with on the desktop.
AMD has tested the waters in the sea of platforms as well marketing their mobile configurations under the PUMA name. They matched Intel’s Centrino in purpose, but were much more relaxed in scope. What that meant was that their hardware requirements weren’t as strict for a system to earn a badge saying it was part of this or that platform. Unfortunately, no one asked for a PUMA like they did a Centrino.
Lessons were learned and AMD has since set its sights on the performance desktop computing market with its latest platforms. Spider was their first platform launched back in late 2007. However, early benchmarks already doomed it to not really being a threat to Intel in terms of performance. Thus the hoopla was downplayed and the Spider entered the room quietly without anyone knowing it was there. Of course plenty of people tried to step on it because it was supposed to be the mythical Core Duo Killer. So the marketing message for Spider ended up being “Performance per watt”. That’s OK if you’re a lightbulb but not when you’re building a top end gaming system or workstation.
Earlier this year at CES 2009, AMD officially launched the new Dragon platform with a little more fanfare. They even put it in action at the Tiger Direct Charity PC Race at CES, where journalists raced to put systems together as quickly as possible. Dragon and now the recent Dragon spring refresh, are meant to provide a bonus to those who use certain components in their performance computing endeavours. It also provides a great value proposition for those of us that want to take their sweet time upgrading, offering both a DDR2 and a DDR3 upgrade path as well as more CPU options with common sockets. Not to mention, AMD has cleverly priced their systems to be great performers at an even better price compared to similarly equipped Intel builds. And so Dragon now is representative of their new platform slogan: Performance per dollar.
In order to understand this tough road that AMD took, we’re going to have a bit of an AMD Platform history lesson by taking you back to Spider and then bringing you up to speed on today’s brand new Dragon refresh (we’ll call it reloaded…much cooler) platform. We’re going to see how each of these platforms stack up against each other in a flurry of benchmarks. We aren’t so much out to find the performance king, as we are hoping to show what you’ll get for how much dough. Let’s introduce the contestants shall we?
The AMD Spider Platform – Q4 2007/Q1 2008
Spider was the first to the plate, and consisted of an AMD Phenom quad-core processor, ATI Radeon HD 3800 series video card, and AMD 7-series chipset based motherboard. Though it was a great boon for budget conscious gamers it couldn’t best Intel’s hardware at the time in performance. A system built around the Spider platform was maybe 85% to 90% the cost of a similar Intel based rig, but it only offered 85% to 90% of the performance. Though that does scale well, the margin was too narrow to draw in a lot of people from the Intel camp, and only just win over the afore mentioned budget gaming crowd. However, an AMD Spider Platform did offer some noteworthy power savings over an Intel build, which is why their marketing latched onto “Performance Per Watt”.
The AMD Dragon Platform – Q4 2008/Q1 2009
AMD went back to the drawing board in a way, and came back with the new Dragon platform to coincide with the release of their latest Phenom II line of processors. Though anything under the Dragon umbrella simply had to have an AMD Phenom II processor, ATI Radeon HD 4800 series graphics card, and an AMD 7-series chipset motherboard to qualify, the first Dragon out of the stables was the triple-core based platform. This configuration plays more to budget gamers who want to upgrade in the future, and those in the home theatre PC crowd. It also allowed you to take along your DDR2 RAM and existing CPU while taking advantage of the very excellent 4800 series GPUs.
The AMD Dragon “Reloaded” Spring Refresh – Q2 2009
Since the Dragon platform isn’t so rigid in its requirements, the follow-up configuration to reach reviewers wasn’t too far behind. This Dragon is strictly for gamers and those that need the most power for the least coin, hence the company line of “Performance Per Dollar” this time around. The configuration is based on AMD’s flagship quad-core CPU, top end HD 4800 series video card, and a 790FX based motherboard. Like many other Dragon configurations, this particular setup supports all of AMD’s tweaking utilities. With this setup, or one similar, you can take full advantage of the AMD Fusion for Gaming utility, tweak to your heart’s content with AMD Overdrive, and fully enjoy AMD Live! Media Explorer.
Worth the Price of Admission?
Speaking of “Performance Per Dollar” or better known as bang for the buck, we should probably touch on that before taking a look at the performance numbers. This is especially important when we start to consider the big picture on how these platforms stack up against Intel’s best. The one thing that AMD has almost always had going for it was that it was the less expensive to build a top notch AMD system than a similarly equipped INTEL system.. The icing on the cake was that AMD didat one point also hold the performance crown. While that reign ended more than two years ago, they’ve still managed to hold on to the lower price brackets with their builds.
With the release of Intel’s top end Core i7 the price difference between an Intel and an AMD system has widened significantly. To illustrate this I priced out both the entry level and top end Dragon systems at a major online retailer. The price for both systems was $1050 USD and $1350 USD respectively. This was before taxes and shipping and was only based on the system itself; no peripherals were included. This is very inexpensive when compared to a similarly constructed Core i7 based system. The Spider platform wasn’t priced out because it’s now out of production.
AMD has aimed their platforms not at the Core i7 though, but rather at the Core 2 based builds and seems to be doing a very good job at these price points. Although clearly, Core i7 is superior to anything AMD has at the moment, the Dragon Reloaded and Dragon do very well against Core 2 and still costs quite a bit less, allowing AMD to run with the “Performance Per Dollar” line. Still, this article is about a sibling rivalry. About how far AMD has come from Spider to Dragon to Dragon reloaded. Let’s continue shall we?
System Setup and Preparation
Since this review is a straight up, head-to-head comparison of what are effectively three separate computers, we are just going to cut to the chase and list off the benchmarks and what they mean. Here’s the components you’ll find in common in all three configurations:
- Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB 10000rpm SATA2 Hard Drive
- HighSpeed PC Top Deck Tech Station
- Lian Li MAXIMA Force Extreme PS-A650GB 650W Power Supply
- Samsung SyncMaster 2493HM 24 Inch LCD Monitor
That’s pretty well it for common components. In addition to those components, the Spider system features an AMD Phenom 9850 BE CPU, an Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe motherboard, and a Sapphire TOXIC HD 3870 video card. Both the Spider and entry-level Dragon platforms share the same OCZ 4GB PC2-8500 Gold Edition dual channel DDR2 kit, due to some compatibility issues with our standard Corsair kit and the Asus M3A78-T motherboard used in the entry-level Dragon system. To round off the entry-level Dragon rig, we installed an AMD Phenom II 720 triple core CPU and a GIGABYTE Radeon HD 4850 video card.
The pièce de résistance of this showdown is the system pictured above. This is the top end system we’ve put together for this article, with the help of AMD and Gigabyte. Though this isn’t the most opulent AMD Dragon configuration you could throw together, it’s fairly representative of the average gaming system, and as configured can play most games at a decent clip. Over and above the common components already listed, we have installed and AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition CPU, a Gigabyte MA790FX-UD5P 790FX based AM3 motherboard, a Corsair XMS3 DHX 4GB DDR3-1600 dual channel memory kit, and a Gigabyte Radeon HD 4890 1GB PCIe video card.
As for benchmarks, we are throwing everything we can at this siblin rivalry. You’ll see tests for the CPU, chipset, bus, hard drive I/O, memory, and graphics. We are using both synthetic and real world tests in the hopes or not only finding where each system has strengths and weaknesses, but where the best bang for the buck lies.
Raw System Performance
We start our round of benchmarks with the SANDRA suite of tests from SiSoftware. These synthetic benchmarks test the raw performance of a number of components found in a system. Newer versions of SANDRA even test multiple components at the same time in the hopes of producing results closer to real world operations. However we’re only interested in the raw numbers as a way of establishing a baseline before we go into more dynamic benchmarks.
The Processor Arithmetic benchmark produced some interesting results, which showcased the benefit of multiple cores from a standpoint of raw processing power. In both the Dhrystone instructions test and the Whetstone floating point test, the triple core AMD Phenom II 720 came in below the quad core Phenom 9850 BE and Phenom II 955. The benchmark also scales near perfectly as processor speed increases. The Phenom 9850 BE is rated at 2.5 GHZ and the Phenom II 955 is rated at 3.2GHz; a speed increase of 22%. This results in a 23% increase in Dhrystone performance and a 25% increase in Whetstone performance moving from the older to newer processor.
The Processor Multimedia test takes a 640×480 fractal image and manipulates it in different ways to emulate various multimedia tasks. This test is also multithreaded, and as we see from the results it does show a bias towards more cores and faster processors. Once again we see the scores scale nearly inline with the speed increase from the Phenom to the Phenom II. The Phenom II based Dragon platform does add a few extra percentage points onto that score, no doubt thanks in part to improved instructions on the newer Phenom II core.
Finally we test memory performance using the Memory Bandwidth benchmarks. This benchmark tests sustained memory bandwidtg, rather then burst or peak. This provides a clearer picture of expected memory perform. The test is also multithreaded, and since the memory controller is part of the Phenom core performance dependant on the processor.
With that in mind, it’s no surprise that that test results scale with the speed of the processors used for testing, and the number of cores in them. This is further reinforced by the difference in performance between our entry level Dragon platform, and the previous generation Spider platform. This conclusion is drawn from the fact that both the Spider and entry-level Dragon platforms use the same RAM.
Overall Performance
Since many say that SiSoftware Sandra isn’t a real world representation of actual system performance, we turned to PCMark Vantage to round off our suite of system benchmarks. Though still synthetic, the Futuremark team has put a lot of work into making their suites closely mimic real world operations. This does show in running PCMark Vantage.
As for the results, they weren’t as mundane as the previous SiSoftware Sandra test. The Composite score for all systems didn’t show a whole lot of difference between the quad core Phenom 9850 and the triple core Phenom II 720. The TV and Movies suite did show a little drop for the triple core CPU, and the Productivity suite showed a marked increase in performance for the triple core trooper. This processor is definitely a stubborn little part. The Phenom II 955 X4 of course blew everything out of the water.
Driving the Hard Drive Really Hard
Hard drive testing was fairly straight forward, but it was important to verify whether there is or isn’t any performance difference in regards to I/O on either platform. With that in mind, it does come as a surprise that the lower speed rated processor of the bunch posted the highest MB/s speed rating. This may be due to extra operations running in the background on the test system, or a number of other factors. Really there should be any variance in speed since it’s the same hard drive. I guess we could either chalk this up to benchmark error or something running the background on our Vista x64 based test bed.
It’s still nice to know that access times weren’t drastically increased either way. We even managed to pull a near 7ms access time on the top-end Dragon platform.
We decided once again to use PCMark Vantage to button everything up as see how each platform performs in the PCMark HDD test. These tests punish the hard drive to make sure it’s working and within spec. Here we see a drop in performance as we move up the specification ladder.
Once again there’s no reason for this other then system activity at the time the benchmark was running. Either way, the older system is the best one for hard drive performance.
Gaming Glory in 1337 Words or Less
Finally we turn to 3D performance in the hopes of showing how much or little of a performance boost you are getting moving from one platform to another. For a baseline test, we decided to do a couple run throughs of 3DMark Vantage.
Here is where you can start to see the performance of the video cards start to take over. As we moved to each system, the results scaled with the power of video card being used. Though the processor did having something to do with, it seems to be the video card show from here on out.
A Few More Words On Gaming Glory
Crysis was a little different from 3DMark, especially in the way we tested. Since this isn’t a video card review, I used the Processor based demo to test out the game. This demo of course still relies on the video card for most of the rendering, but it places you in an environment with a lot of destructible objects. It’s fun to watch as the NPC in the demo blows up building after building, and there’s physics objects flying everywhere. It also provides a great test to find out how the CPU impacts performance. With that in mind, it’s rather awesome to see the triple core CPU pull ahead of the previous generation quad core CPU. Unfortunately you still need a high end video card (or set of video cards) to run Crysis with everything cranked up like in our benchmarks.
World in Conflict is an RTS game that compares nicely with Crysis for computer pounding performance. It of course has the added feature of being an RTS title, which means it needs to use the processor to computer all sorts of NPC movement. Once again this makes it rather surprising that the triple core is pulling ahead of the previous generation quad core in terms of performance, and of course, nowhere near the performance of the current Phenon II X4 955. This is with all details cranked to maximum.
The Intel Side of the Equation
So how does this all compare to the big blue giant and the products they’ve released. Well if the rest of the review sites out there are to be believed, the Phenom II is still playing second fiddle to Intel’s Core i7. Actually, you can believe that because Core i7 really is a bit of a “Smackover” on AMD in terms of the race for performance…for now. That being said, the performance is on par with the processors found in the Core 2 Quad family. I wouldn’t count out AMD just yet on this information though. Remember that their products are much cheaper then Intel’s latest and greatest, and thought you may get 95% of the performance, you’re only paying 90% of the price. With the uncertainty of the economy, this is definitely something that computer enthusiasts cannot ignore.
Speaking of enthusiasts, AMD has launched Black Editions with every processor refresh, thus adding more value to their parts. This allows additional performance gains from these processors if one chooses to overclock. AMD makes this easy by providing easy to use software to make this so, though I’m sure seasoned veterans will want to jump straight into the BIOS screens.
Final Thoughts and Conclusion
AMD has definitely managed to put together a great package in their Dragon reloaded and even their original Dragon platform. This latest performance platform is flexible enough to give you plenty of choice over components and configurations. Hold on to your DDR2 if you need to and upgrade to DDR3 when you’re ready. It’s also watchful enough to give you lots of utilities and tools to further tweak you gaming and entertainment needs. This is also assisted by highly overclockable parts like the Black Edition CPUs.
In the end, I would have to give props to the entry-level Dragon package. It’s a great marriage of components and outputs, and gives you plenty of expansion room to move from onboard video to CrossfireX. I’m not saying that you couldn’t build a budget system with some of the components from the top-end system. It’s a flexible platform after all. It’s just that the the entry-level configuration gives you a lot of room for upgrading. Either way I have to say bravo to AMD for having a clear cut definition of their platforms and for showing noteworthy gains from one platform to another. It isn’t all BS. Now all they need to do is come to par with Intel in terms of performance and then the processor wars will become very interesting again.
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