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We will see how the Athlon II fares against the Core 2 Duo E8400 clocked at the same frequency. I do not have my hopes set really high since the E8400 is a processor that costs almost twice as much, but unfortunately that is all what I have on hand. I will also compare it to the previous Athlon architecture codenamed Kuma.

As for the benchmarks, there will be a set of system benches and another set of gaming benches. Fraps will be used to record the FPS in Mirror's Edge, Bioshock and Call of Duty: World at War whereas for all other gaming tests, the built-in benchmarking tool will be used. All of these will be ran at 3 different resolutions except Call of Juarez, Lost Planet and World in Conflict where the minimum settings will be used to prevent bottleneck from the graphics card.

Test Setups

Athlon II system:

• AMD Athlon II X2 250 processor
• Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P AM3 motherboard
• NVIDIA GTX 260 videocard with Forceware 185.85
• Seagate 7200.11 with 32MB cache SATA2 drive
• Mushkin XP-800AP power Supply
• 2x2GB Mushkin DDR3-1066 7-7-7-21-1T

Phenom II system :

• AMD Phenom II x2 550 Black Edition processor
• Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P AM3 motherboard
• NVIDIA GTX 260 videocard with Forceware 185.85
• Seagate 7200.11 with 32MB cache SATA2 drive
• Mushkin XP-800AP power Supply
• 2x2GB Mushkin DDR3-1333 8-8-8-24-1T

Core 2 Duo system:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 processor
• ASUS P5E3 motherboard
• NVIDIA GTX 260 videocard with Forceware 185.85
• Seagate 7200.11 with 32MB cache SATA2 drive
• Mushkin XP-800AP power Supply
• 2x2GB Mushkin DDR3-1333 8-8-8-24-1T

Athlon system:

• AMD Athlon Kuma 7850 Black Edition processor
• Gigabyte MA790GP-DS4H AM2+ motherboard
• NVIDIA GTX 260 videocard with Forceware 185.85
• Seagate 7200.11 with 32MB cache SATA2 drive
• Mushkin XP-800AP power Supply
• 2x2GB Mushkin DDR2-800 4-4-4-12-1T

Benchmarks:

• SiSoft Sandra Professional
• WinRAR
• PCMark Vantage
• Handbrake
• POV-Ray
• Cinebench
• Call of Juarez
• World in Conflict
• Lost Planet
• Far Cry 2
• Bioshock
• Call of Duty: World at War
• Crysis Warhead
• Left 4 Dead
• Mirror's Edge