Performance on a budget is the name of the game with todays review. The AMD Athlon II X3 440 tri core processor is here to show you that performance shouldn’t cost the earth!
Product on Review: AMD Athlon II X3 440 Processor
Manufacturer: AMD
Street Price: Approx £66
AMD are a very large chip manufacturer with many years of experience producing processors and chipsets for both business and home use.
Here’s a little about the company:
Over the course of AMD’s four decades in business, silicon and software have become the steel and plastic of the worldwide digital economy. Technology companies have become global pacesetters, making technical advances at a prodigious rate — always driving the industry to deliver more and more, faster and faster.
However, “technology for technology’s sake” is not the way we do business at AMD. Our history is marked by a commitment to innovation that’s truly useful for customers — putting the real needs of people ahead of technical one-upmanship. AMD founder Jerry Sanders has always maintained that “customers should come first, at every stage of a company’s activities.”
As i mentioned in my previous review (Phenom II 555 Black Edition) in recent years they have been somewhat outperformed by Intel’s offerings and only pulled back some ground with their introduction of the Phenom II and Athlon II ranges.
The result of this was the arrival of a chip from each range to be put up for review.
The first chip (the Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition dual core) produced a great performance – next up is a model from their more affordable Athlon II range and takes the form of the X3 440 tri core.
Specifications
AMD Athlon II X3 440 Tri Core Processor – 3.00GHz, Socket AM3, 1.5MB L2 Cache, 2000MHz (4000 MT/s) FSB, Retail, Processor with Fan
• 3.00GHz
• Socket AM3 and AM2+ (938-pin) compatibility
• 3 processing threads
• 1.5 MB of L2 cache (512KB per core)
• 2000MHz (4000 MT/s) FSB
• Dual channel DDR2 and DDR3 memory controller
• 45nm process
• 95w TDP
HyperTransport™ Technology HyperTransport™ Technology up to 4000MT/s full duplex, or up to 16.0GB/s I/O Bandwidth
Type of Memory Supported Support for unregistered DIMMs up to PC2 8500(DDR2-1066MHz) and PC3 10600 (DDR3-1333MHz)
The chip
With a default core clock of 3ghz this is the fastest tri core Athlon II that AMD offer.
The only real difference between the Athlon II and Phenom II ranges are the absence of L3 cache in the Athlon II’s design. We’ll see if this affects performance
The 440 tri core.
The Athlon II 440 uses AMD’s ‘Rana’ core which is a cut down version of their four cored ‘Propus’ design. In some cases these tri cores can be unlocked to full quad core functionality.
As with all of AMD’s recent AM3 chips the Athlon II X3 440 works with both AM3 and AM2+ motherboards due to its identical socket layout and inbuilt DDR2 and DDR3 memory controllers.
The AM3 socket with 938 pins.
The chip supports full hardware virtualization allowing virtual machine environments to be run that function with the relevant hardware.
Despite its budget leanings it looks to be a nicely specified CPU.
Overclocking and testing
Test setup
Motherboard: Asus M4A89GTD PRO/USB3
RAM: 4gb Corsair Dominator GT PC3-12800 C7 DDR3
HDD: 250gb WD 7200rpm SATA HDD
Optical drive: LG Bluray/HDDVD Multidrive
CPU cooler: Coolermaster Hyper TX3
PSU: Hiper Type-R 580w
Overclocking
The Athlon II X3 440 clocked pretty well. The Asus M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 i used to clock the chip did a great job and returned pretty decent numbers.
As i’m sure you’re aware the ASUS motherboard has its own ‘Turbo Key II’ overclocking switch. This allows the board to choose its best stable clock. Using this method the board pushed the Athlon II X3 440 to a stable clock of 3.48ghz @ stock voltage.
That turned out to be stable some i moved onto manual clocking.
I upped the motherboard’s FSB to 248mhz, set the voltage to 1.45v. This resulted in a 3.72ghz which i once again found stable.
I must also mention that i got the chip to boot with a FSB of 255mhz and a final clock of 3.82ghz – it entered windows and allowed a bit of light use but under load it proved unstable. I’m sure with extra voltage and some other tweaks this clock speed could have been stabilised.
For posterity i’ve included an Everest screenshot showing the Athlon II X3 440 @ 3.82ghz.
Next i used the motherboards other ‘Core Unlocker’ feature – used together with the Turbo Key II the Athlon II X3 440 unlocked to a full quad core and also clocked up to 3.48ghz automatically @ 1.45v.
Manual clocking as a quad core was somewhat fruitless as i wasn’t able to increase the FSB at this voltage. It might have gone further with more voltage but i didn’t want to push too far beyond AMD’s specifications.
Temperatures
I monitored temperatures whilst running the overclocks and discovered that (like the 555 Black Edition) the Athlon II X3 440 ran nice and cool even when heavily clocked.
Temperatures shouldn’t be an issue.
Testing
A selection of desktop based hardware tests from Everest’s Ultimate (Trial Edition), Futuremark’s PCMark05, WinRAR, 3DMark Vantage and a couple of recent gaming titles.
Everest performance
Everest is first up. It’s a PC benchmarking and monitoring utility used by many PC owners to test and assess their PC’s capabilities.
Athlon II X3 440 @ stock.
Athlon II X3 440 @ 3.48ghz.
Athlon II X3 440 @ 3.72ghz.
Athlon II X3 440 unlcoked to quad-core @ 3.48ghz.
Phenom II 555 @ stock.
Phenom II 555 unlcoked to quad-core @ 3.456ghz.
Phenom II 720 @ 3.4ghz.
i5 750 @ 3.2ghz.
As with the Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition tested earlier this month the Athlon II X3 440 compares well to the overclocked Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition here but it’s numbers aren’t quite as impressive as the Intel i5 750 @ 3.2ghz.
PCMark and WinRAR
PCMark05 is a desktop performance benchmark program from Futuremark. It allows users to assess the ability of their PC to perform standard desktop based windows tasks.
PCMark05 from Futuremark.
Even in standard triple core trim its numbers aren’t a million miles off even the mighty i5 750. Once that fourth core is unlocked and the chip run @ 3.48ghz the Athlon II X3 440 gets incredibly close to the i5 750 @ 3.2ghz. A very impressive result especially when you consider the Athlon is less than half the cost of the Intel.
WinRAR is a program that compresses files so they take up less space. The number crunching ability of a CPU generally translates into the speed of the compression process.
WinRAR compression utility.
The Athlon II X3 440 was just off the pace of the Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition but regardless it still delivered a decent set of numbers.
Gaming performance
We now move on to graphical performance – first up we take a look at 3DMark Vantage. This is another benchmarking program from Futuremark but this time looks exclusively at the gaming performance of the PC it’s assessing.
Futuremark’s 3DMark Vantage.
For what many would consider a budget chip the Athlon II X3 440 does astonishingly. In stock trim as a tri core it does well but add that additional core (if yours is lucky enough to unlock) and the numbers improve further – it certainly doesn’t embarrass itself against much more expensive hardware.
Blacksite came next. A fairly modern title it still manages to push most modern hardware – especially when the action becomes frantic!
Blacksite.
Overall performance was very good indeed. At lower resolutions where CPU limitation sets in the Athlon II X3 440 does lose a little ground. However, with the majority of gamers using resolutions of 1680×1050 and more the differences become marginal at most.
The last test involved Race Driver GRID. Another modern title. Steady and reliable framerates are key here to guarantee a smooth gaming experience.
Race Driver GRID.
Again performance was very nearly the same. The Athlon II X3 440 loses some ground at 1280×1024 but recovers those numbers as the resolution increases.
As with the Phenom II i looked at recently all clocks at all resolutions were perfectly playable and incredibly smooth.
Conclusion
AMD have impressed me again. The Athlon II X3 440 is an impressive chip. 3 guaranteed cores that can clock over 3.7ghz is very impressive indeed. Yes it\’s missing an unlocked multiplier like the Black Editions AMD offers but with such a high stock clock and a high standard multiplier it\’s still a good prospect.
Plus there\’s always the outside chance your chip might have a fourth core that can be unlocked which provides yet another perk at a fairly budget price.
As i\’ve stated before – as long as your motherboard offers an unlocking capability and has clocking credentials the ingredients for a very decent performance increase are all there.
The superb AMD Athlon II X3 440.
Gaming and general desktop performance is quite comparable to the competition from Intel too which is nice. Especially when you consider the i5 750 and i7 920 are over twice and three times as expensive respectively.
I recently concluded that AMD are back on target with this range of chips and i can honestly say that the Athlon II X3 440 does nothing to tarnish this impression. Budget builders (and even high end users looking for some cheap kicks) should take a serious look.
Pros
+ Impressive overclocking performance
+ Smooth windows and gaming performance
+ Cool running
+ Extremely well priced considering potential performance increase (see next point down *)
+ * Core unlock potentially offers a fully unlocked and high clocked quad core processor
+ Great backwards compatibility with DDR2 and DDR3 memory controller
+ Good price/performance ratio will stand it in good stead against Intel\’s new i3 range
Cons
– Not quite as friendly/easy to clock as an Intel… however, once again i\’m really splitting hairs here!!!
The Athlon II X3 440 is an exceptionally good budget processor. In my opinion once clocked it has the potential to provide 90% of the performance of the competition whilst being half the cost. It\’s consequently been a very easy decision to award it our top accolade – the Vortez Hardware \’Gold medal\’.
We would like to thank AMD for providing us with the Athlon II X3 440. Discuss this review on our forums
