AMD's New Athlon/Semprons Give Old Phenom CPUs A Big Run For The Money

To no real surprise when running graphics tests, the Phenom 9500 from 2007 and the Phenom II X3 710 from 2009 get spanked against this year's AMD AM1 APUs. While these APUs are just around ~$55 and less while these Phenom CPUs launched for much more, the technology has advanced a great deal. The Phenom parts also have a 95 Watt TDP while these budget APUs consume just 25 Watts.

With the Reaction Quake 3 game the Phenom II X3 710 performance using the Radeon HD 4290 graphics from the 890GXM motherboard the performance was about the same as the dual-core Sempron 2650 with its Radeon HD 8240 graphics running at 400MHz.

With the Unvanquished open-source game the original AMD Phenom performance with the RS780/RS880 graphics was still well short of AMD's new AM1 APUs.