One of AMD’s most affordable CPU’s up for review – the Athlon II X2 255 dual core.
Product on Review: AMD Athlon II X2 255 Processor
Manufacturer and Sponsor: AMD (Advanced Micro Devices)
Street Price: Approx £56 At the time of review
Another day another chip from AMD. A massive semiconductor company with a considerable market share – they’re one half of the ‘Big Two’ and provide graphics processors as well as desktop processors.
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.”
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.”
This is my fourth AMD chip review and focuses on the budget end of the market with the Athlon II 255 dual core processor.
After the mighty ‘Goliath’ in the form of the 1055T I’m intrigued to see how this little ‘David’ fares.
Specifications
As expected the Athlon II X2 255 is quite a pared down model compared to some of the recently tested CPU’s.
AMD Athlon II X2 255 Dual Core Processor ADX255OCGQBOX – 3.10GHz, Socket AM3, 2MB L2 Cache, 2000MHz (4000 MT/s) FSB, Retail, Processor with Fan
• 3.1GHz
• Socket AM3 and AM2+ (938-pin) compatibility
• 2 processing threads
• 2MB of L2 cache (1MB per core)
• 2000MHz (4000 MT/s) FSB
• Dual channel DDR2 and DDR3 memory controller
• 45nm process
• 65w TDP
• 3.1GHz
• Socket AM3 and AM2+ (938-pin) compatibility
• 2 processing threads
• 2MB of L2 cache (1MB per core)
• 2000MHz (4000 MT/s) FSB
• Dual channel DDR2 and DDR3 memory controller
• 45nm process
• 65w 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
The Athlon II X2 255 uses AMD’s ‘Regor’ core – a 45nm design offering 1MB L2 cache for each of the CPU’s two processing cores.
Unlike some of AMD’s recent chip releases the ‘Regor’ core is a true dual core meaning there are no additional dormant cores available to unlock.
The Athlon II 255.
As with all of AMD’s recent AM3 chips the Athlon II X2 255 works with both AM3 and AM2+ motherboards due to its identical socket layout and inbuilt DDR2 and DDR3 memory controllers.
Socket 938.
The chip supports full hardware virtualization allowing virtual machine environments to be run that function with the relevant hardware.
Athlon II’s carry AMD’s hardware level C1E – a power saving feature that should help make all of these Athlon II CPU’s very frugal power users.
Setup, clocking and temps
Test setup
Motherboard: Asus Crosshair IV Extreme
RAM: 4gb OCZ 1333MHz PC3-10666 C9 DDR3
HDD: 160gb WD 7200rpm SATA HDD
Optical drive: LG Bluray/HDDVD Multidrive
CPU cooler: Coolermaster Hyper TX3
PSU: Nexus RX-8500 850w
Overclocking
Despite not being one of AMD’s special multiplier unlocked ‘Black Editions’ thanks to a high multiplier the 255 begins at an impressive 3.1GHz stock clock speed.
255 @ stock.
A voltage bump of just under 0.1v allowed me to push the FSB to 240MHz which returned a creditable overclock of just over 3.73GHz.
3.73GHz.
I knew there was more in the chip so pushed on.
Another voltage bump (only 0.06v this time) allowed an extra 11MHz on the FSB to give just under 3.9GHz.
3.89GHz.
So close to 4GHz… it was now a mission!!!
Another 0.06v increase on the CPU voltage (0.05v wasn’t quite stable) allowed a nice clean 260MHz on the FSB. 4.03GHz was the final stable clock.
Just over 4GHz.
I wouldn’t advise this kind of voltage (I tend to limit myself to 1.55v) although I have seen users at close to 1.6v who say all is fine and dandy.
None the less that’s an impressive overclock for a £55 processor.
Temperature
Temperatures at stock were exceptional – probably all thanks to the C1E system.
Temperatures.
Even when clocked they were more than acceptable. The TX3 happily coped with it which is good news for anyone with a half decent cooling solution.
PCMark05 and SuperPi
A selection of desktop based hardware tests including Futuremark’s PCMark05, SuperPi, Cinebench and the x264 HD benchmark.
PCMark05 up first measuring general desktop performance with a scattering of graphical tests for completeness.
PCMark05.
The 255 certainly isn’t a desktop wizz at stock. It’s quite obviously at the bottom of the pile at stock speeds although with a 4GHz overclock it pulls close to the i5 and almost even the i7 albeit with both of those chips at stock clock speeds.
SuperPi is next and illustrates the benefits brought by increases in CPU and memory speeds.
SuperPi.
Again core count makes virtually no impact on results. Here the 255’s limitation is its lack of L3 cache which I’ve heard can in some cases provide the equivalent of around 200MHz of additional performance. Of course core speed is what counts but the L3 equipped competition seems to do better at similar clock speeds. As a side note – the 720 score is probably effected by being run on an AM2+ motherboard with DDR2 memory.
Cinebench and x264 HD
Cinebench utilises multiple cores to render a scene and then scores the result based on the speed with which the process is completed.
Cinebench.
The results are pretty much as you’d expect. The limitation of a reduced core count is quite obvious. It’s raw stock performance isn’t a country mile away from the more expensive 555 Phenom II. Overclocking yields a pretty decent boost in performance – that stock clocked 720 Phenom II at the bottom just shows how an extra core adds grunt but the clocked 255 certainly isn’t miles behind.
x264 is the final desktop style benchmark used to test the CPU. It’s a High Definition video encoding benchmark that once again benefits from both additional processing cores and overclocking too.
x264 HD.
The results here mirror what I found in the previous test. The numbers for the stock 255 were identical to the stock 555 Phenom II in dual core guise. Of course additional cores help but the overclocked 255 actually manages to beat the 720 tri core – especially in ‘Test B’.
3DMark06 and Vantage
We now move on to graphical performance – first up we take a look at actual benchmark software in the form of both 3DMark06 and 3DMark Vantage. This is another benchmarking program from Futuremark but this time looks exclusively at the gaming performance of the PC it’s assessing.
First up is 3DMark06 running at its standard 1280×1024 setting. Lower resolution is better in CPU benchmarking as it allows us to more easily identify any performance limitations introduced by low CPU speed or limited core count.
3DMark06.
The lack of cores certainly impact the score here – it ends up quite a distance behind the others at stock clocks although the 4.03GHz overclock really pulls back ground.
For Vantage I had much more information to go on since I’d used for my Intel motherboard testing a while back.
Vantage.
Again we see a low score and in Vantages case we see little improvement in the score. As I mentioned in the last review Vantage certainly seems more GPU dependant for a high score so you probably shouldn’t read too much into it!
Blacksite and Dead Space
Now we have the first of our game tests. Blacksite is a great little game – it looks good and provides a good performance indicator for hardware.
Blacksite.
The stock performance is slightly down compared to some of the beefier multi core CPU’s and ones with greater cache specs. Overclocking does provide a very decent boost though bringing the chip back in line with some of the others I’ve tested.
Dead Space the survival horror game is a useful test for a system and seems to scale well with CPU, GPU and resolution changes.
Dead Space.
Yet again the performance figures suggest a very slight dip in absolute framerate but this certainly doesn’t effect gameplay in any way. Once the 255 is clocked the numbers yet again pull close to much more expensive competition.
Far Cry 2 and Unreal Tournament III
Second to last is Far Cry 2. As you know by now this is a particularly useful game to test with since the game comes with its own built in benchmarking program.
Far Cry 2.
The 255 returns numbers that belie it’s tiny cost. It’s virtually indistinguishable from its more expensive brethren. Nice!
Unreal Tournament III up last. Using the benchmark program is easy although unfortunately it only returns the average FPS rather than minimum and maximum.
Unreal Tournament III.
Here the 255 results do show it’s cache limitations a little. Of course it’s perfectly playable but to put the performance into perspective the Phenom II X2 555 at stock speeds happily beats the 255 at stock and even matched it when it was clocked to the 4.03GHz core speed I had managed to extract from it.
Conclusion
Another day another great processor from AMD.
The 255 is certainly an affordable and easy to clock processor. A 900MHz overclock was certainly not what I’d expected and was a very positive surprise.
As you’d expect from a cache limited dual core processor desktop grunt is quite severely limited. I certainly wouldn’t want to be encoding video after video on it!
The AMD Athlon II 255.
Gaming performance largely goes in line with the spec sheet. It was down in some of the tests but this was either indistinguishable during actual gaming or the deficit could be closed through overclocking. During the testing I would say that it was just as smooth as any of the processors I’ve tested.
It’s an impressive little chip however I would say that its cost is so close to some of the Athlon II X3 range that it may end up a second choice to those. Of course, as you saw in my 440 review, there’s every chance you’d end up with a fully unlockable quad core which would certainly swing a decision in its favour!
In fact the combination of low cost, low power usage and decent gaming performance could well mean that this little chip finds its way into HTPC’s. Would be perfect.
Pros
+ Pretty impressive overclocking performance
+ Smooth windows performance
+ Good gaming performance however needed to be clocked to do this
+ Very cool running even when heavily overvolted and overclocked
+ Nicely priced
+ Great backwards compatibility with DDR2 and DDR3 memory controller
Cons
– Unlockable tri core chips like the 440 aren’t that much more
– Heavy desktop duties like encoding show it’s power limitations
+ Pretty impressive overclocking performance
+ Smooth windows performance
+ Good gaming performance however needed to be clocked to do this
+ Very cool running even when heavily overvolted and overclocked
+ Nicely priced
+ Great backwards compatibility with DDR2 and DDR3 memory controller
Cons
– Unlockable tri core chips like the 440 aren’t that much more
– Heavy desktop duties like encoding show it’s power limitations
The AMD Athlon II 255 dual core receives our Vortez Silver Award – congratulations!
