AMD has been pushing its low-power capabilities on mobile platforms for quite some time now. Its Turion processors have seen wide adoption during the laptop surge over the past year. Rated at 35 watts TDP, the Turion sipped the juice from the batteries at a glacial rate. For the desktop, however, AMD systems can afford a little leeway in terms of TDP thanks to better cooling options, even in stock conditions.
That’s where the new BE (Brisbane) processors come in. Rated at 45 watts TDP, they run a little hotter than the Turions, but still significantly lower than the standard 65 watts on full-fat Athlons. The BE processors are said to be designed for builders of Media Centers or other configurations where consumption and noise may be an issue.
The BE series also introduces AMD’s new naming convention for their CPUs. The 2xxx indicates a series of the same major technologies while the last three digits can be used to compare relative performance. For example, a 2350 would perform lower than a 2400. The BE-2350 we’re reviewing is clocked at 2.1GHz and has 1MB of L2 cache.
We tested AMD’s CPU on MSI’s K9A2 Platinum motherboard, which features AMD’s high-end gaming chipset, the 790FX. This chipset gives the K9A2 full 16-lane performance for BOTH the PCI-e slots, overcoming shortcomings of previous Crossfire configurations. It also supports the AM2+ socket for the yet-to-be-seen Phenom processors from AMD. The new platform supports DDR2-1066 RAM and HyperTransport 3.
If you though Crossfire was good, the K9A2 Platinum actually has FOUR PCI-e slots for graphics. They have been designed to work with ATI’s triple and Quad Crossfire configurations whenever they become available.
Elsewhere on the board, you get six SATA connections with RAID capability, Gigabit LAN and up to 10 USB ports. Like all Platinum boards, the K9A2 Platinum doesn’t cut corners. Another thing to note is the new Circu-Pipe design. Unlike the earlier boards, the Circu-Pipe heat pipes have been redesigned so that it doesn’t get in the way of the larger graphics cards you see today. Nice.
The BE-2350 scored 4,273 points in PCMark05. Given the low-power design, the result isn’t too bad. In POV-Ray, the result for multi-core is 597.56 pixels per second, with each core doing 299 PPS. The other CPU test results we have are from Quad-Core extreme CPUs, so a comparison in this respect would be unfair. It does, however, illustrate the power of multi-core systems for certain applications. Core scaling was pretty good for the Athlon X2, with Cinebench showing that two cores performed 1.86 times better than a single core.
Most impressive about the BE-2350 was the fact that the CPU temp was a chilly 29 degrees Celsius at idle. This was a mere three degrees above the ambient temperature at the time of the test. This means you can turn your CPU fan way down without running the risk of melting your CPU.
PCMark05 tested the graphics in our setup with a result of 10,145 points. This was about 1,000 points below our tests with X38 boards, but we believe the hugely different CPU had something to do with that. The overall score for the board was 5,434 points; sligthly higher than the scores we got from other AMD boards with faster processors. The memory and hard disk scored 3,480 and 5,371 points respectively.
In conclusion, AMD’s BE-series CPU’s definitely holds up to its promise of Cool and Quite computing while delivery reasonable dual-core performance. MSI’s Platinum boards have not disappointed us, and neither has the K9A2 Platinum. With its advanced chipset and support for future technology, we would like to visit it again when AMD make them available.
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