AMD Phenom X3 8450 - DigitalVersus

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AMD Phenom X3 8450

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Specifications
Socket	AM2+
Number of cores	3
Clock rate	2.1 GHz
Cache	1 MB
Thermal Design Power	95 W
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Technology	65 nm
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Régis Jehl
Updated: November 06, 2008 - Test date: October 31, 2008

The Phenom X3 Line

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 this 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.

AMD hoped that its line of triple-core processors, the Phenom X3 series, would compete with Intel's Core 2 Duo range of a dual-core CPUs.

This is the slowest member of the X3 family we tested, at 2.1 GHz, and we found it to be around 15% slower than the next model up, the 2.3 GHz X3 8650.

That means that it takes 8 minutes 46 seconds to encode a DivX video file instead of 7 minutes 29 seconds.

Compare the AMD Phenom X3 8450 with the Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 and other CPUs in our
Product Face-Off

The X3 8450 is less powerful for 3D gaming, too, only managing a frame rate of 23 fps in World in Conflict against 28 fps on the X3 8650 and 32 fps from Intel's Core 2 Duo 37200.

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.

For comparison, the Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 rates at 161 W and 222 W respectively for these two measures, and the Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 155 W and 195 W respectively.

Pluses

Very fast for certain tasks

Minuses

Two slow on most tasks

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.