Athlon II X4 635 and Phenom II X2 555 CPU Review

3DMark Vantage Professional

3DMark Vantage measures Shader 4.0 (i.e., DirectX 10) gaming performance. First we tried to run this program under the “Entry” profile with the motherboard on-board video enabled. Only AMD785G could run this program (achieving an Entry score of E2311); Intel G45 could not run 3DMark Vantage even on the “Entry” profile selected. This is old news in the industry: while officially Intel G45 is labeled as being a DirectX 10 part, in fact it can’t run DirectX 10 games or simulations.

The numbers you see below are the results running the “Performance” profile with the GeForce 9600 GT installed.

Under the “Performance” profile from 3DMark Vantage with a GeForce 9600 GT installed Phenom II X2 555 achieved the same performance as Athlon II X4 620 and Pentium E6300. Athlon II X4 635 also has achieved the same performance level as Core 2 Duo E7500. This shows that here the video card is more important than the CPU for DirectX 10 gaming.

Comparing exclusively the CPU benchmark results from 3DMark Vantage, Athlon II X4 620 was 13% faster than Phenom II X2 555, which achieved the same performance level of Pentium E6300. Athlon II X4 635 was 16% faster than Core 2 Duo E7500 under this benchmark. But as you can see, a higher CPU performance may not translate into a higher gaming performance nowadays.