Celeron, Pentium Dual Core and Athlon X2: Which One is the Best USD 70 CPU?

3DMark Vantage Professional

3DMark Vantage is the latest addition to the 3DMark series, measuring Shader 4.0 (i.e., DirectX 10) performance. We ran this program on its “Entry” profile, which is run at 1024×768. We also included the results for the CPU benchmarking done by this program.

On 3DMark Vantage Entry score all CPUs achieved the same performance level, except for Pentium Dual Core E2160, which achieved a score 4.58% lower than the one achieved by Athlon X2 4600+.

On the internal CPU benchmark conducted by 3DMark Vantage, Athlon X2 4600+ was again the fastest CPU among the ones we included in our comparison, being 6.51% faster than Core 2 Duo E4400, 10.70% faster than Pentium Dual Core E2180, 15.02% faster than Celeron E1400 and 20.46% faster than Pentium Dual Core E2160.

The memory cache size made difference here, with Core 2 Duo E4400 (2 MB cache) being 3.93% faster than Pentium Dual Core E2180 (1 MB cache) and 7.99% faster than Celeron E1400 (512 KB cache). Pentium Dual Core E2180 was 3.90% faster than Celeron E1400.

Pentium Dual Core E2180 was also 8.81% faster than Pentium Dual Core E2160 and Celeron E1400 was 4.73% faster than Pentium Dual Core E2160.

It is important to note that a higher CPU score in this program didn’t translate into a higher 3DMark score, since the video card is nowadays the component that most affect gaming performance.