CPU Roundup April 2010

SiSoft Sandra Pro Business

SiSoft Sandra is an application that we use often in our benchmarks on HardwareHeaven. While we aren’t firm believers in purely synthetic testing, Sandra uses clever algorithms to replicate real world scenarios and is a good way of getting a baseline before going into real world testing later in the review.

In the CPU arithmetic test, the extra cores of the X3 and X4 Athlons give them an advantage over the two dual core models with the Phenom II X2 555 and Athlon II X2 255 perform very similarly in this test, despite the differing cache levels. The i3-530 compares favourably to the AMD CPUs, performing significantly better than both dual-core AMDs and marginally better than the triple core. It is not until we run four AMD cores that they take the lead.

In the memory bandwidth test, the Phenom II X2 555 performs notably better than the Athlon II X2 255. The X3 and X4 models performed better in this test with the i3-530 lying in-between the dual core and triple core AMDs.