AMD Athlon X2 7750 Review

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.

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.

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.