by Rob Williams on August 28, 2006 in Processors
It’s a great time to be building a dual core system, due to great competition between AMD and Intel. We are taking a look at the AM2 4600+ which proves to be a decent value due to recent price drops. Does it warrant a purchase, or should you be looking elsewhere?
Sandra is a great tool to have because it includes many benchmarks that stress all of your components. The first two, Arithmetic and Multi-Media, rely heavily on your CPU and are designed to take advantage of more than one core. So, the higher the frequency, the better the score. That’s evident in the charts… the results scaled nicely with the overclocks. On the multi-media side of things, between stock and 2.76GHz we have a 14.5% performance increase. Not too hard to believe since it’s a 15% overclock though.
Everest 3.0
Everest, like Sandra, is another good tool to use in order to see how your CPU overclocks scale. However, the only thing I don’t like about the program is that each new version cannot be compared to the last, due to ever changing algorithms.
Once again, we are getting pretty congruent results here. ~14.5% performance increases for a 15% overclock. I am not paying attention to the top overclock as much as 2.76GHz for the sake of it being stable on only one core. However, if you manage to get a 4600+ or similar chip that clocks to 2.85GHz reliably you will know what to expect.
Sciencemark 2.0
Sciencemark is yet another awesome benchmarking tool to have, because it’s very, very in-depth for those who want the nitty gritty of everything. All results are in seconds for time to compute. Yet again, we are seeing 14.5% – 15% increases, as one would hope. We didn’t manage to break 9s for a cipher attack, but it came quite close.