Product Face-Offs
AMD Phenom X3 8750
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| Socket | AM2+ | ||
| Number of cores | 3 | ||
| Clock rate | 2.4 GHz | ||
| Cache | 1 MB | ||
| Thermal Design Power | 95 W | ||
 See all specifications | |||
| Technology | 65 nm |
 Hide specifications | |
Régis Jehl
Test date: October 31, 2008
Test date: October 31, 2008
The Phenom X3 Line
This, the first of AMD's Phenom X3 line, the 8750, was released in April 2008 and ran at 2.4 GHz. Since then, the range has expanded to include the 8450 model at 2.1 GHz and the 8650 at 2.3 GHz.
Based on the K10 architecture, Phenom X3 CPUs have three cores, a 1.5 MB cache and use AM2+ sockets.
They're all engineered at 65 nm with a Thermal Design Power of 95 W.
Based on the K10 architecture, Phenom X3 CPUs have three cores, a 1.5 MB cache and use AM2+ sockets.
They're all engineered at 65 nm with a Thermal Design Power of 95 W.
Thinking that three cores are always going to be better than two, the manufacturer has put them in direct competition with Intel's Core 2 Duo range of dual-core processors.
It's reasonable, then, to put this X3 8750 up against Intel's Core 2 Duo E7300, which retails at roughly the same price point.
Compare the AMD Phenom X3 8750 with the Intel Core 2 Duo E7300 and other CPUs in our
Product Face-Off
Product Face-Off
In general terms, it's Intel that steals the day, with better performances overall.
However, the results are not as simple as they look and it's worth comparing these two processors in a little more detail.
In particular, it's important to note that this Phenom X3 processor did better than its Core 2 Duo (C2D) rival on certain tests.
The most striking example of this was encoding H.264 video, where the X3 took 2 minutes 29 seconds against the C2D's 2 minutes 52 seconds.
When it came to our Photoshop test, though, the results were the other way round: the X3 took 6 minutes 45 seconds to apply a complex filter while the
C2D took 5 minutes 17 seconds.
The C2D also won out when we tried using it for 3D gaming, reaching a frame rate of 34 fps against the X3's 28 fps.
So, not a completely clean sweep for Intel's C2D range, which are outclassed by the X3 for certain applications.
In terms of our physical measurements of the X3 processors, we were rather disappointed by how much power they used: this one caused our test PC to ramp consumption up to 206 W while idle and 286 W at full speed.
The Intel model we compared it to earlier, the E7300, rates at 155 W and 196 W respectively for these two measures.
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Very fast for certain tasks
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Two slow on most tasks
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Very high power consumption
AMD's line of Phenom X3 processors can be very good if you limit your usage to certain applications where they perform well. In general, they did poorly on most of our tests, and used a lot of power.
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