Athlon II X3 vs. Ryzen 3: How AMD's Performance Has Evolved & Performance-Per-Watt

[k1e0x]

I own one of those Rana chip and that sucker is absolutely amazing for its price/age. I think I got it new for $45 bucks, I OC'ed it hard and it ran for practically 10 years. That is prob the best CPU I've ever owned when you factor in the price.

I own a 445, and its still kicking for daily use. Some people could even unlock the 4th core on these for free performance. All the Core2's are gone. The Phenom 1's are gone, the Opteron's are gone.. but that little cheep ass Rana still somehow finds some use.

[Michael_S]

Not everything comes down to performance. Sometimes power efficiency, physical size, and noise become more important and will save you more money in the end. In other words, a Ryzen 1200 is a very cheap product and will save you money over what you use now in electricity (and in turn, cooling during the summer).

I agree. However, I would be replacing the old motherboard and RAM along with the processor.

I might save 0.5 kwh (wild guess) per day just from a more energy efficient idle state and light loads and maybe another 1 kwh (very roughly) for each Blu Ray I rip and re-encode. But even if you add in the extra work my air conditioner has to do in the summer, it would take nearly five years to pay for itself. If I did a lot of heavy gaming, or was ripping films more than once or twice a month, then the calculation changes.

[Michael_S]

I had not heard of 0 A.D. before, just looked it up and I intend to start playing it, so thanks for that.

My pleasure. I play it more for the fun of building up my town and enjoying the artwork than serious strategy challenges.

[grok]

I'm sure there are some Q6600 around but these were rather power hungry. Paired with any of the beasts in the Radeon 4800 series you get something very powerful that could run AAA games from a few years ago but that's a space heater even when idling.

The Core2duo's are the new Pentium 4 (except not heating exaggeratingly) they're used by Joes and grandmas all over the place. A friend scored a 2.93GHz one with Intel graphics from the E7000 series, for very cheap. It's stuffed with sticks of 1GB ddr3 inside. Good deal. It's like a modest and modern laptop but never overheating or becoming useless when the keyboard gets full of beer and dirt or when the power supply or connector goes ape shit.

BTW on all those AMDs including Rana, X2, Phenom 1 : the thermal pad that came with the default heatsink turns to a thick thermal insulator glue, this was a problem years ago already though. So if you can clean all that material off without bending CPU pins and put *new* paste in, you'll make them work right again.
It might be some common knowledge now, at least on laptops that you need to do a thermal paste job after x years. But on the AMD desktop CPUs you really have to see that thermal insulator glue, or hear a 7000 rpm fan, or watch the temp creep to 101C, 102C, 103C.. (emergency cut off at 105C)

It's superlative. On the plus side, the CPU doesn't catch fire.

[schmidtbag]

I agree. However, I would be replacing the old motherboard and RAM along with the processor.

I might save 0.5 kwh (wild guess) per day just from a more energy efficient idle state and light loads and maybe another 1 kwh (very roughly) for each Blu Ray I rip and re-encode. But even if you add in the extra work my air conditioner has to do in the summer, it would take nearly five years to pay for itself. If I did a lot of heavy gaming, or was ripping films more than once or twice a month, then the calculation changes.

You bring up valid points. Depending on whether your tasks can take advantage of them, I wonder if maybe a new GPU would suit you better. It's much easier to just buy a replacement GPU (even a used one - doesn't have to be that fancy) and offload stuff like encoding onto that. A Kepler or GCN 1.0 GPU ought to give you plenty of performance for a low price. I have a PC assembled from spare or used parts for BOINC. Back in 2011 this PC would've been worth $3000, but I paid less than $500 for it (including parts I bought myself when they were new). One of the GPUs in it is a V7900 that I got for $35 including shipping, but was worth around $800 new. Works perfectly fine, it just needed a fan cleaning. For compute purposes, this is still a pretty good GPU. Might be worth it for you to look into something similar.

[bnolsen]

I'm still sitting here with an athlon II x4 640 as my desktop. It's mostly just a dumb terminal though. It likes to lock up if I plug in USB devices without grounding myself or if I statically shock my desk (yeah wth?). I hope we see some good performing power miserly inexpensive mini systems come out sooner rather than later. Waiting for ryzen gen2 before upgrading my real dev/compile boxen.

[torsionbar28]

Interesting. The lower idle power specifically gives me reason to start considering an upgrade for the home NAS server. It's running FreeNAS on an old Phenom II x3 720 (95w) that I had laying around, but maybe it's time to consider putting that one out to pasture and eventually rebuilding it in a few months with a raven ridge APU once they're available.

FYI the freenas folks specifically recommend a platform with ECC memory support. I've got mine on an Opteron 4365 (about $25, ebay) and Supermicro H8SCM mobo (about $45, ebay). This gives me a rock solid proper server platform with ECC support. And the Opteron 4365 chip is super low power, just 40 watts TDP. It's a fantastic platform for rock-solid FreeNAS, very cool and quiet, and a real cheap price.

[schmidtbag]

I'm still sitting here with an athlon II x4 640 as my desktop. It's mostly just a dumb terminal though. It likes to lock up if I plug in USB devices without grounding myself or if I statically shock my desk (yeah wth?). I hope we see some good performing power miserly inexpensive mini systems come out sooner rather than later. Waiting for ryzen gen2 before upgrading my real dev/compile boxen.

Seems to me your PSU is the real problem here. Are you perhaps plugging it into a 2-prong outlet? Your chassis could also be the problem, where you might have something shorted out and just don't realize it.

If you want a power efficient thin client, I would highly recommend ARM boards. Even the original Raspberry Pi would be great for that.

[leipero]

grok Got C2D e7200 for free few years back, togheter with motherboard, 3GB DDR2 and 9800GT GPU (that I gave to friend), clocked it to 3.0GHz (from 2.53 stock), no voltage change, cool, quiet works like charm for web browsing and media.

bnolsen It's most likely grounding problem with your wall socket or cable, there's easy method to test if that is the case (what I usually do). Touch metal part of yout chassis with outward pointing finger (above nail, after first wrist from the nail), move it very slowly over the metal chassis, if ground is not right, you would feel similar feeling as something is "holding" your finger (similar to when you move it over soft rubber), if ground is fine, you would feel the same way as if you move over the plastic part of your chassis (you can compare), I don't know how to describe that feeling well, but you would know if that was the case trust me.

[Michael_S]

You bring up valid points. Depending on whether your tasks can take advantage of them, I wonder if maybe a new GPU would suit you better. It's much easier to just buy a replacement GPU (even a used one - doesn't have to be that fancy) and offload stuff like encoding onto that. A Kepler or GCN 1.0 GPU ought to give you plenty of performance for a low price.

I have two desktops, and both have mid-range AMD GPUs. On Linux, the last time I checked GPU-enhanced video encoding for AMD GPUs was a pain to set up. I just checked, and I don't see any mention of it on the HandBrake website or docs. (Edit: VAAPI) is mentioned on the FFMPEG website, but the guide doesn't make it a simple "run these six commands and go" process. I started the process last year, and then gave up and used CPU-only encoding.

I have a PC assembled from spare or used parts for BOINC. Back in 2011 this PC would've been worth $3000, but I paid less than $500 for it (including parts I bought myself when they were new). One of the GPUs in it is a V7900 that I got for $35 including shipping, but was worth around $800 new. Works perfectly fine, it just needed a fan cleaning. For compute purposes, this is still a pretty good GPU. Might be worth it for you to look into something similar.

Cool. My last Ebay purchase to salvage didn't turn out as well. I still came out ahead, I spent $500 to get what turned out to be something worth about $700. But I hoped to get $1000 out of the purchase... and then discovered that the PSU and GPU were junk (with the former probably the reason the latter was broken).

Again, are you able to do video encoding with that V7900 on Linux? Are there programs I'm missing?