Drivers

AMD Athlon X2 7750

Written by Jeff_Tom

Sunday, 14 December 2008 21:10

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%

ATI 8.5 Catalyst Performance Review

Written by Jeff_Tom

Wednesday, 21 May 2008 16:01

Drivers are one of the most if not the most important component in a computer. Without stable, functioning drivers for your operating system of choice your hardware is about as good as an expensive paper weight. Video card drivers are ones that almost always need constant updates with new games, fixing bugs, enhancing performance and new features. Once a month, every month now for the past few years ATI have rolled out a new driver update for their Catalyst drivers with new fixes, features, and also some claims of performance updates. Today we're going to look at the latest Catalyst drivers from ATI in version 8.5.

We won't go into all of the fixes and updates in the new drivers for that you can read the very lengthy release notes here. Here's a quick rundown of a few highlights of new features though.

Catalyst™ Control Center Component Video
This release of Catalyst™ introduces 480i and 480p support. These formats will
be found in the pre-defined component video format list found in the Catalyst™
Control Center->Component Video->Advanced page.

ATI Graphics Driver Un-install Enhancement
This release of Catalyst™ introduces an update to the ATI un-install utility. The
utility now pop up dialogue box to show two options to the end user,
• Remove ATI Radeon™ graphics software, leave chipset software (RECOMMENDED).
• Completely remove all ATI/AMD (Graphics/Chipset) software.

SECAM TV Out Support
This release of Catalyst™ introduces support within the graphics driver to enable
TV output adhering to the SECAM standard.

1080p HDTV custom mode
This release of Catalyst™ 1080p HDTV display mode. This feature will be available
for display devices that use an HDMI connector and is available under the
Windows XP and Vista operating systems.

HDMI Audio for non-standard TV modes
This release of Catalyst™ introduces HDMI audio support for all TV timing
modes and non-standard (CEA 861b) TV modes. If a non-standard mode is used,
on initial connection to the TV, a pop-up notification should let the user know that
the audio may be out of sync. A UI allows for the audio to be disabled by the user
if desired. The UI in Catalyst™ Control Center would show the list of TV timing
modes (both standard and non-standard) and the capability to enable audio for a
given mode.

Adaptive AA on OpenGL for Catalyst™ Control Center
This release of Catalyst™ introduces Adaptive AA for Orca Driver, geometry for
alpha tested objects are now submitted multiple times to the hardware using the
multi-sample mask feature to update one sample at a time in the frame buffer
using centroid sampling. With each pass of the sampling position for textures is
shifted to be at the location of the sample that is being updated in that pass.

1080p24 Mode Support
This release of Catalyst™ introduces 1080p24 mode support This feature will be
available for display devices that use an HDMI connector and is available under
the Windows XP and Vista operating systems.

Windows XP Service Pack 3 support
This release of Catalyst™ introduces WHQL certified support for Microsoft’s
Windows XP Service Pack 3 update for all ATI Radeon™ Series products.

We'll be taking a look though at performance improvements in the new drivers and testing for them. Here are the claims from ATI.

• Call of Juarez DX10: Performance increases up to 12% on systems containing
an ATI Radeon™ HD 3xx0 series of product
• Halo: Performance increases by 10-30% across all of the supported ATI
Radeon™ series of products
• Lost Planet DX10: Performance increases from 5 to 35% on systems containing
an ATI Radeon™ HD 3xx0 series of product
• Stalker DX9: Performance increases by 20-50% when HDR is enabled in the
game; across all ATI Radeon™ HD38x0 series of products
• World in Conflict DX10: Performance increases up to 25% on systems containing
an ATI Radeon™ HD36x0 and/or an ATI Radeon™ 38x0 series of
product. Higher performance gains are noticed on systems containing an ATI
Radeon™ 3870x2 series of product

We'll put this to the test with two different ATI video cards.

Mother Board	Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe Wi-Fi
CPU	AMD Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition
Video Card	Various
Memory	Corsair XMS Dominator 2GB
Hard Drive	Western Digital Raptor
Case	Tsunami Thermaltake
Display	Samsung 20" LCD Westinghouse W4207

Our test OS was Windows Vista Ultimate SP1. All the latest software revisions were used in our testing and v-sync was disabled. We'll look at the Radeon HD 3870 and the Radeon HD 3650. Unfortunately our 3870X2 had issues and did not work. We'll start with the Radeon 3870.

We start things off with World in Conflict where we see decent gains of about 20% going through their built in benchmark. Not bad for a driver release.

Call of Juarez is a little less kind yielding not as much as we had hoped for at least through the DX10 benchmark.

Lost planet sees a larger bump in the snow level though the fly level is a little less so.

Stalker is one of the games that gives us a little bit less in results than we wanted playing the game through FRAPS.

Now we move onto the Radeon HD 3650.

Here we don't see so great results with Call of Juarez.

Lost Planet again nothing at least using the in game benchmark.

Even World in Conflict, which showed results for the 3870, nada here.

Conclusion:

Overall the Catalyst 8.5 drivers don't seem like a huge step up in performance. Not that the claims were extraordinary but it's good now and then to take a look at driver performance claims and put them to the test. More importantly in this driver release seems to be a number of new and important additional features such as finally being able to uninstall only video card drivers or motherboard drivers as well as many bug fixes. We had no stability problems at all so don't fear in upgrading to the 8.5 Catalyst drivers if you are an ATI card owner.

Last Updated on Friday, 23 May 2008 06:22

ATI Catalyst AMD64 Windows Drivers Beta 2 Performance Analysis

Written by Chris Tom
Saturday, 23 October 2004 17:55
Denver has finished his testing of the beta 1 and beta 2 AMD64 ATI Catalyst AMD64 drivers. Several games are tested, and performance has indeed increased.
Read more...

64 bit Video Card Driver Comparison

Written by Chris Tom
Wednesday, 16 June 2004 04:11
Anandtech has a comparison of 64 bit video card drivers. Of course we have shown ATI driver performance as well as Nvidia performance under 64 bit a while back. Software support has been a long time in coming to AMD's hardware, but we are very happy to see that everything is progressing nicely. Software support is lacking; there are some stability issues, and performance is just about to the level that we would expect. Here's to the hope that the completion of the development of 64bit software goes smoothly to all involved.

ATI Catalyst Beta 1 AMD64 Driver Performance

Written by Chris Tom
Thursday, 20 May 2004 21:23
I've posted up my tests of the just released ATI AMD64 drivers. Enjoy.
Read more...

More Articles...

Nvidia AMD64 Linux Graphics Driver Update

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