With any system you will want to see a combination of synthetic testing and real-world. Synthetics give you a static, easily repeatable testing method that can be compared across multiple platforms. For our synthetic tests we use Everest Ultimate, Sisoft Sandra, Futuremark's 3DMark Vantage and PCMark Vantage, Cinebench as well as HyperPi. Each of these covers a different aspect of performance or a different angle of a certain type of performance.

Memory Bandwidth

Memory is a big part of current system performance. In most systems slow or flakey memory performance will impact almost every type of application you run. To test memory we use a combination of Sisoft Sandra and HyperPi 0.99.

Sisoft Sandra

Version and / or Patch Used: 2011
Developer Homepage: http://www.sisoftware.net
Product Homepage: http://www.sisoftware.net
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AMD still has some work to do on their memory bandwidth. We just cannot get the same performance out of these as we should be considering the speeds the memory is running at.

Raw CPU performance is not bad for these two, especially when we kicked the 975 BE up to 4.2GHz.

HyperPi 0.99

Version and / or Patch Used: 0.99
Developer Homepage: http://www.virgilioborges.com.br
Product Homepage: http://www.virgilioborges.com.br
Download It Here

HyperPi is a front end for SuperPi that allows for multiple concurrent instances of SuperPi to be run on each core recognized by the system. It is very dependent on CPU to memory to HDD speed. The faster these components, the faster it is able to figure out the number Pi to the selected length.

For our testing we use the 32M run. This means that each of the four physical and four logical cores for the i7 and the four physical cores of the i5 is trying to calculate the number Pi out to 32 million decimal places. Each "run" is a comparative to ensure accuracy and any stability or performance issues in the loop mentioned above will cause errors in calculation.

Here the performance is good for an AMD CPU. Remember that HyperPi is a memory killer, so with AMD's slower memory performance we are seeing some decent times. This means that the CPU can take it, but the memory speed just can't keep up.