Most of the news out of AMD lately has been out of ATI with their video cards lately and most new attention is focused on Phenom II which should be coming out very soon from AMD. But AMD is also launching a new CPU series codenamed Kuma. This is a Stars core with a 2MB L3 cache and the Hypertransport bus runs at 1.8Ghz instead of 1GHz of most dual cores. We don't have a lot more technical information on the processor at this time but we'll update this review when we get more. For now here's what you probably care about: benchmarks and overclocking.

Here's our test system.

Mother Board	Gigabyte 790GX
Memory	Corsair XMS 4GB
Hard Drive	Western Digital SE 16 750GB
Case	Tsunami Thermaltake
Display	Samsung SyncMaster 30"

 

 

Windows Vista x86 SP1 was our test system with ATI Catalyst 8.12 drivers. The only vanilla X2 we had on hand was the X2 5000+ which runs at 2.6GHz so we down clocked our 7750 to 2.6GHz from 2.7GHz. Usually this is fairly accurate representation of what a processor with that stock clock would perform at though occasionally it is faster.

 

3DMark shows a good performance increase from the CPU which probably benefits heavily from the L3 cache on the Kuma processor.

 

We definitely weren't maxing out our Radeon 4850 at medium settings on DX9 with Crysis to lean the balance towards the CPU and it pays off in Crysis gaining 7fps over an X2 5000+.

 

Cinebench 10 isn't a huge difference but you do shave 13 seconds from rendering.

 

 

 

 

Cinebench saves 14 seconds with the Kuma processor.

 

 

Valve Map compilation benchmark shaves off a good 56 seconds from the rendering time thanks more than likely to again the large L3 cache and faster HyperTransport bus.

 

Valve's particle benchmark isn't quite as large a giving 4 more points.

 

 

With more performance comes more power taking another 20W to run at idle and 25W at load under Valve Map creation benchmark under load. Cool 'n Quiet was disabled with testing.

 

We were able to get into Windows at 3.3GHz with a large increase of voltage bumping things up to 1.5v but it was not stable at this overclock. 3.1 or 3.2GHz is probably more reasonable overclock as with most dual cores from AMD.

 

Conclusion:

Kuma seems like a good bump up from the previous Athlon 64 X2 dual cores though the L3 cache and higher Hypertransport bus do increase overall power consumption. We don't have retail pricing at this time but we will update the review when we see the processor at e-tailers. We wish we had time to compare this to an Intel dual core processors but unfortunately we're a bit strapped for time. This should definitely help keep AMD more competitive in the dual core arena and is a nice part to tide things over until Phenom II.

Pricing:

The Athlon X2 5000+ we compared the 7750 Kuma to you can pick up for an easy $59.99.

Score: 92%