Power-draw, and DDR2 1,066 vs. DDR2 800MHz comparison
| HEXUS.power - idle-power reading | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AMD Athlon X2 7750 BE | AMD Athlon X2 7850 BE | Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5200 | AMD Athlon X2 6000+ | AMD Athlon II X2 250 |
| 111 | 96 | 70 | 76 | 77 |
| HEXUS.power - under-load reading | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AMD Athlon X2 7750 BE | AMD Athlon X2 7850 BE | Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5200 | AMD Athlon X2 6000+ | AMD Athlon II X2 250 |
| 175 | 157 | 100 | 161 | 125 |
Shipping with a 65W TDP, the idle and load power-draw numbers are much better than the other AMD chips, clearly, but, evaluated as a system, not as good as the Pentium Dual-Core's. 25W is telling in a small form-factor system.
DDR2 1,066 vs DDR2 800
Here we look at the performance benefits, if any, of running DDR2-1,066 (5-5-5-15-2T) memory against DDR2-800 (4-4-4-12-2T). Appreciating the latencies of DDR3 and based on prior performance results, DDR2-1,066 equates well to DDR3-1,333 (9-9-9-24-2T) in real-world benchmarks.
| Processors | Athlon X2 7850 BE DDR2-800 | Athlon X2 7850 BE DDR2-1,066 | Improvement of DDR2 1,066 vs DDR2 800 | Athlon II X2 250 DDR2-800 | Athlon II X2 250 DDR2-1,066 | Improvement of DDR2 1,066 vs DDR2 800 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ScienceMark (LIB) | 60.23 |
56.66 | 5.92 |
51.76 | 48.34 | 6.6 |
| SiSoft SANDRA (HIB) | 7.7 | 8.06 | 4.68 |
8.92 | 9.81 | 10 |
| HEXUS.PiFast (LIB) | 42.33 | 41.61 | 1.7 |
38.94 | 38.23 |
1.8 |
| DivX (LIB) |
398 | 395 | 0.75 |
359 | 356 | 0.83 |
| POV-Ray (HIB) | 935.57 | 937.47 | 0.2 |
1179.35 |
1180.48 | 0.09 |
Take the three benchmarks - HEXUS.PiFast, DivX, and POV-Ray - and you see that there's practically no gain when moving to faster memory. DDR3 support is nice, sure, but it won't make a discernible difference to performance until, say, 2,000MHz-rated memory becomes cheap.