Let's get back to early 2009. At this time AMD was ready lo launch the long awaited Phenom II. At first there were two SKUs ready - X4 920 and X4 940 BE, both for socket AM2+. After the not so good first generation Phenoms it was definitely step forward. I used the fastest model - X4 940 BE. As the competition I took the Core i7-920 which was also very new at the time (launched in November 2008). Both CPUs had similar price initially, albeit the X58 platform for the Core i7 was more expensive. So how does these two perform today?
All the test scenes are 100% CPU limited. Testing resolution is always 1920x1080 with 16xAF and vsync off. All the videos are recorded using dedicated PC with capture card, there is zero performance impact on the tested CPUs.
CPUs tested:
Phenom II X4 940 BE [4C/4T, 3.0 GHz] http://hw-museum.cz/cpu/379/amd-phenom-ii-x4-940-black-edition
Core i7-920 [4C/8T, 2.8 GHz] http://hw-museum.cz/cpu/118/intel-xeon-w3520
Just a note - I had to run Xeon W3520 because my i7 920 had one memory channel dead. Still, it is exactly the same CPU, only different name. All core turbo frequency of the i7 is 2.8 GHz, it never runs at the base clock. Phenom II X4 940 has no turbo and runs at fixed frequency of 3.0 GHz.
0:00 Introduction
0:25 Black Mesa
1:34 Call of Duty: World at War
3:55 DiRT Rally
5:43 Far Cry 2
7:16 Rise of the Tomb Raider
8:29 Power consumption
GPU used for all benchmarks - GeForce GTX 1080 (391.35 driver).
The power consumption of the CPUs is measured by my own wattmeter designed for this purpose. It also has interface to integrate the power figures to HWinfo64 and therefore also to MSI Afterburner and RTSS. The whole system power consumption measurement is provided by Corsair RM1000i and HWinfo64.