Core i5-2500K vs. Phenom II X4 975 BE CPU Review

3DMark 11 Professional

3DMark 11 Professional measures Shader 5.0 (i.e., DirectX 11) performance. Since the integrated graphics engine of the Intel CPUs and AMD 880G chipset aren’t DirectX 11, the only way to run this game was by installing an add-on video card. We used a GeForce GT 430 video card, which is an entry-level DirectX 11 video card. We ran this program at 1440×900 using the “Performance” profile.

This program provides three different scores: graphics, physics and combined.

All CPUs achieved comparable graphics scores. This was expected, since this number measures exclusively the video card performance, not taking the CPU into account.

The physics score measures exclusively the physics performance of the system, in our case the CPU performance, as the video card was always the same. Here the Core i5-2500K (3.30 GHz) was 60% faster than the Phenom II X4 975 (3.6 GHz), 63% faster than the Phenom II X4 970 (3.5 GHz), and 79% faster than the Core i5-661 (3.33 GHz).

The combined score shows a balance between the graphics and the physics performance achieved by each system being tested. Here the Phenom II X4 970 (3.5 GHz) and the Phenom II X4 975 (3.6 GHz) achieved the same performance, which was 5% higher than Core i5-2500K’s.