Testing and Results

Before 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. I adopted this method from another writer here at Benchmark Reviews and it seems to do a great job of flushing out what only seem to be stable overclocks.

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 proves extremely important in the many gaming benchmarks, as the first run serves 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 X2-260 review, the following test systems and comparison processors will be used. As was mentioned before, the Athlon-II X2-260 will be directly compared to compared to its predecessor, the Athlon-II X2-255. The Athlon-II X3-445 is presented to show the next step up from the Athlon-II X2-260. The cost difference between the Athlon-II X2-260 and the X3-445 is $11, while the difference between the two X2 processors is $9. This gives us a good idea of where we should expect the performance of the respective processors to be. We have also included the results of both the Athlon-II X2-260 and the X3-445 when overclocked. An Intel i7-920 has been included in the tests to show how the Athlon-II X2-260 compares to the very high-end computing performance.

• Processor: 2.66GHz Intel Core i7 920 Bloomfield/Nehalem BX80601920 ($280)
• Motherboard: MSI X58 Pro LGA1366 Intel X58 ATX
• System Memory: Kingston 6GB (3 x 2GB) KVR1333D3K3/6GR DDR3 1333MHz (PC3 10666) (CL7-7-7-20)
• Video: MSI N285GTX-T2D1G-OC NVIDIA GTX 285 1GB
• Disk Drive 1: OCZ Agility Series OCZSSD2-1AGT30G 30GB SSD
• Disk Drive: SEAGATE Barracuda ST31500341AS 1.5TB SATA
• Optical Drive: ASUS DRW-24B1ST DVD Burner
• PSU: Corsair CMPSU-850TX 850W
• Enclosure: NZXT GAMMA
• Operating System: Windows 7 Professional x64

AMD Socket AM3 Test System

• Processors: AMD Athlon-II X2-255, AMD Athlon-II X2-260, AMD Athlon-II X3-445
• Motherboard: Biostar TA890GX HD
• System Memory: 2x2GB Patriot Gamer Series DDR3 (1600MHz@9-9-9-24)
• GPUs: MSI N285GTX-T2D1G-OC NVIDIA GTX 285 1GB, ATI Radeon HD4290 On-Board
• Disk Drive 1: OCZ Agility Series OCZSSD2-1AGT30G 30GB SSD
• Disk Drive: SEAGATE Barracuda ST31500341AS 1.5TB SATA
• Optical Drive: ASUS DRW-24B1ST DVD Burner
• PSU: Corsair CMPSU-850TX 850W
• Enclosure: NZXT GAMMA
• Operating System: Windows 7 Professional x64

Benchmark Applications

• EVEREST Ultimate Edition v5.30.1900 by Lavalys
• Passmark PerformanceTest v6.1
• PCMark Vantage v1.0.2.0 by Futurmark Corporation
• SiSoft Sandra 2010.1.16.26
• Cinebench v11.5
• Resident Evil 5 Benchmark
• Devil May Cry 4 Benchmark

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