| AMD Athlon II X2 250 AM3 Processor |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Processors | |
| Written by Mathew Williams | |
| Wednesday, 03 June 2009 | |
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Testing and ResultsBefore I begin any benchmarking or overclocking, I thoroughly stress the CPU and memory by running Prime95 on all available cores for 12 hours. If no errors are found, I move on to a gaming stress test. To do this, I use Prime95 again to stress the processor, while running an instance of FurMark's stability test on top of this. If the computer survives this test for 2 hours without lockup or corruption, I consider it to be stable and ready for overclocking. After achieving what I feel is stable overclock, I run to these tests again for certainty. The goal of this stress testing is to ensure the clock speeds and settings are stable before performing any benchmarks. After all, what good are performance measures if the system cannot reliably produce them? Once the hardware is prepared, we begin our testing. Each benchmark test program begins after a system restart, and the very first result for every test will be ignored since it often only caches the test. This process proved extremely important in the World in Conflict and Supreme Commander benchmarks, as the first run served to cache maps allowing subsequent tests to perform much better than the first. Each test is completed five times, with the average results displayed in our article.
For our Athlon II X2 250 review, the following test systems and comparison processors will be used. While we certainly don't expect the X2 250 to match the performance of all of these processors, including a variety of mainstream and enthusiast hardware allows us to analyze important price per performance considerations. For this particular review, we'll focus on the AMD X2 7850, X2 550, and Intel E7400 as the closest competitors. Intel LGA775 Test System
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