AMD Triple / Quad Core Performance

I'm looking for a new laptop and would like to be able to play some games, not looking to play anything brand new like Crysis but maybe the likes of Half Life 2, The Sims 3, Total War, Fallout 3 and Age of Empires.

I know most of the focus is on Intel CPU's but I've been looking at some HP specs which have the AMD Phenom II P920 Quad Core along with a ATI mobility 5650 GPU, how would this cope with games?

 

Crysis is almost 3 years old, so i would not call it new. The 5650 will do very well. I use the older gen of that card and it works very well. I run Fallout 3 at high settings and will be able to run the other games you listed there at high as well.

Your card is arounnd 20% faster than mine so u will be ok

 

The AMD cpus in general play games just as well. Unless you are looking to play a cpu-intensive game like GTA IV, the video card is of more importance. Having said that, if a quad is in your budget it definitely won't hurt.

 

Thanks guys, thats cool I didn't really mean Crysis being new! But I know its still seen as one of the most CPU / GPU intensive games around, I can get some good discounts on HP Laptops via my companys EPP and I noticed that they had the AMD chips which aren't commonplace in the UK.

 

You could basically play Crysis on that combo with medium settings (and it still looks good even at 1024x768).

 

Im looking at this:
HP Pavilion dv6-3085ea
AMD Phenom II P920 Quad Core
4 GB RAM
500 GB Hard Drive
15.6" High Definition BrightView LED display
ATI Mobility Radeon HD5650
for £709 a good deal? Its good to know that the CPU and GPU combination seems like it will be able to play some decent games!

 

It's a pretty sweat deal if you ask me for just £709.

The Phenom II 920 Quad equals out to the i7 620m in multi-threaded applications that use all 4 cores.

For games, it will be more than enough, plus the power consumption will be low along with the temperatures.

Since the laptop has 5650 Mobility radeon, performance in games will be pretty good.

And you can always consider overclocking the cpu later on if you find it lacking (although there's a high probability you won't since gaming wise it will be on par with Intel cpu's for the most part).

 

Phenom II920 is more than just capable of playing most of the modern games, the HD 5650 will bottleneck the performance in games long before Phenom II920 does because the majority of the today's games are bound by GPU, NOT CPU.

But by no means the HD5650 is an underperforming video card, it's a fairly good card for mainstream gamers.

 

Thanks everyone has given me a lot to think about, the spec looks really good for quite a reasonable price.

 

I wouldn't hesitate if I were in your shoes.
I'd just get that AMD quad with 5650 and be done with it.
;-)
You will be hard pressed finding another deal that comes close to it in terms of price/performance.

 

No, it does not; it's not even close. You are probably thinking of the Core i5s -- the 620M beats the P920 by a substantial amount in most benchmarks even if when all 4 cores are in use. And because of the the P920's pathetically low clock speed (remember, AMD's laptop CPUs have no Turbo Boost!), when an application or game doesn't use all 4 cores (the overwhelming majority currently do not), the performance of the P920 is truly pitiful.

That said, if you've found something cheap (by American standards, £709 = $1100 is way too expensive for that kind of laptop, but electronics are pricier in Europe so I'm not sure), the P920 is probably tolerable. Most games are GPU bound and the ones that aren't are generally multi-threaded so you should be OK.

 

I was under the impression that the performance of Phenom II 920 comes close to i7 620m and in heavy multithreaded tasks surpasses the i5 barely coming to the level of i7 620m.

It's actually rather sad that AMD cpu's are lagging behind Intel solutions.
They can compete with them with the upper mid-range class of cpu's but not the high-end ones.

 

Are you sure you are thinking of the right processors? The P920 is a quad-core K10 CPU without L3 cache that runs at 1.6GHz. The i7-620M is an Arrandale CPU that is nominally at 2.66GHz, but has a Turbo scheme of 3/5 which means it runs at 3.06GHz when both cores are active and 3.33GHz. Thus, even in perfectly multi-threaded applications, the 620M nearly matches the P920 in cores * clock speed and since Arrandale is much better than cache-starved K10 clock-for-clock, the 620M wins by a substantial amount and the benchmarks bear this out. In fact, even the higher end Core i5s beat the P920 quite handily; it's barely even with the low end ones. Quad-core or not, 1.6GHz is simply not enough (particularly with an old architecture).

 

Thanks guys, I'm going to take a look at the laptop in the flesh and see what I think, are there any other decently specced options from anyone else at a similar price?

 

My bad.
I was referring to the N930 (the 2.0Ghz Quad that comes close to 620m in heavy multi-threaded tasks and surpasses i5 in same).

Naming schemes ... sheesh.