First Atom D510/D410 benchmarks are out

Motherboards already up for pre-order

Dec 11, 2009 by

WHILE LOOKING FOR something related, we bumped into a set of Atom D510 and D410 benchmarks by chance on a website that we weren’t familiar with. German website CarTFT.com has kindly provided a small glimpse into the performance of Intel’s upcoming single and dual core desktop Atom processors and the numbers aren’t exactly what we’d call impressive.

Although this is by no means a conclusive test, CarTFT has compared the upcoming Intel D510MO and D410PT motherboards to a range of other Atom based motherboards, including Zotac’s Ion ITX boards. The benchmark does at least gives us a first taste of what’s coming and let’s just put it like this: if you own an Ion base system, then you have nothing to worry about.

Let’s start with the Windows 7 performance numbers and we’ve got a nice little comparison with Asus’ Eee PC 1201H – that’s the one with an Atom 330 and the Ion chipset.  The Atom D510 scores 3.4 while the D410 gets a weak 2.3, however the Atom 330 manages a not much worse 3.2. The memory performance scores for both of the Pinetrail processors come in at 4.6 versus 4.5 for the 330. The Windows 7 Aero score is 3.1 for Intel’s “new” GMA3150 IGP while the Ion chipset scores 3.9. In 3D mode the GMA 3150 only manages a 3 while Nvidia’s Ion gets 5.1. The Eee PC was equipped with a faster hard drive and scored a whole 1.1 points faster than the D510 in the hard drive test and as such the overall score is a bit skewed, but the Eee PC got an overall rating of 3.2 vs. 3 for the Intel D510MO mini ITX motherboard.

In 3Mark 01 the Intel GMA3150 scores the same on both boards, a lowly 3135 points. Nvidia’s Ion chipset on the Zotac board manages 7551, although Intel’s D945GLCF2 – that’s Intel’s own Atom 330 mini ITX board – can’t keep up as it only scores 2466. There are more boards to compare with in the PDF that contains all the benchmarks, but we decided to feature relative selection here. In 3DMark 03 things get drastically worse and for some reason the D510MO board falls behind the D410PT. The best score in this case is an awful 849 points, although this is close to 400 points better than the best GMA950 result. Nvidia’s Ion chipset scores in excess of 4000 points for comparison.

The PCMark 05 results are a little bit more interesting, as the D510MO motherboard manages to keep up with the Zotac board with the single core Atom 230, or at least near enough with a 25 point difference. The D510MO is also some 150 points faster than the 945GC and Atom 330 combo, but still almost 500 points behind the Zotac board with the Atom 330.

In Cinebench R10 all of the CPU’s are pretty much as bad as the next one, but it looks like the multi-threaded benchmarks were left out. The new Atom processors are slightly faster than the current crop, but not by a significant amount. Where the new Atom processor shines is in Super PI 8M where both the single core and dual core processors are nearly a minute faster than its closest competirors.

The most interesting part is the power consumption, as this has been a big question mark. We’re not quite sure on the details of the tests here, but the highest power draw of either system was 33W. The idle power draw isn’t much lower at 26W and both systems seem to draw the same amount of power. This is better than Intel’s 945GC and Atom 330 combo again, which draws between 40W to 45W depending on the configuration and load.

The D510MO is listed for pre-order from several websites and CarTFT is looking for €69.95 ($103) while it’s priced at around $99 in the US. This makes it more expensive than Intel’s D945GCLF2D motherboard, but it’s also significantly cheaper than going for an Ion solution. However, it’s worth noting that both the D510MO and the D410PT are fairly basic boards that lack any kind of digital audio and video interfaces. The D410PT is priced at €59.95 ($88.50) although we were unable to find a retail price in the US for this board.

Overall it seems like Pineview isn’t going to set the world alight, but it should be a slight improvement on Intel’s current Atom platform. Disappointed? Well, if you expected a huge improvement in terms of performance, then you might want to consider looking elsewhere. VIA might just have the replacement solution for the Atom chip, at least if the company can find a few solid, reliable partners to work with that supply gear outside of greater China.S|A

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Lars-Göran Nilsson