The Athlon64 CPU was one of AMD's most important products and, for good reasons, it has been quite successful since its launch late last year. At that time, AMD released the Socket 940 based AthlonFX CPU as well as the Socket 754 based Athlon64 CPU. The FX offered higher performance by utilizing a dual-channel memory controller built on the CPU while the Socket 754's memory controller only offered a single channel. Unfortunately, the FX only accepted registered memory modules which aren’t as easily or cheaply available as your standard non-ECC memory especially at higher speeds like DDR400.
Today, AMD is sorting that problem by releasing their new Socket 939 based CPUs. Again, we see two flavors- the FX53 and the Athlon64 both of which offer a dual channel memory controller that can work with normal non-ECC type of memory modules. The only difference between the two CPUs is the amount of L2 cache- while the FX has a full 1MB, the Athlon64 3800+ only offers 512k L2 cache- based on AMD’s newcastle core. Both these CPUs are clocked at 2.4GHz. We take both of these CPUs out for a ride today. Lets take a look at the testbed.
| Motherboard: |
MSI nForce3-250GB S754, MSI K8T800 PRO Socket 939, ASUS P4C800 Deluxe |
| Memory: |
2 x 512MB Corsair XMS3502 v1.1 DDR-433 Memory Module |
| VGA Card: |
Gigabyte Radeon 9800XT |
| Optical/Hard Drives: |
ASUS 52X CDRW, Western Digital 10,000RPM 36GB Raptor Serial-ATA |
| Sound Card: |
Creative Audigy2 |
| Operating System: |
Windows XP Professional SP1 |
The motherboard we’ve used was manufactured by MSI and is based on the K8T800 PRO chipset from VIA meaning it supports an AGP/PCI bus lock and 1000MHz HT. Below is a picture of the board and a couple of BIOS shots.
For comparison, we’ve chosen the Athlon64 3400+ CPU on the MSI K8N Neo (nForce3-250GB) motherboard as well as the Pentium4 3.0GHz (Northwood) and 3.2GHz Extreme Edition (Prescott) on the ASUS P4C800 motherboard. Memory timings were set to 2.0-5-2-2 for all CPUs. The following applications were tested:
| SiSoft Sandra 2003: |
Memory Bandwidth Benchmarks |
| PC Mark 04: |
CPU, Memory, Graphics, Hard Drive Benchmarks |
| Quake3 Arena: |
Fastest Setting at 640x480 resolution as well as High Quality Settings at 800x600 Resolution |
| 3D Mark 2001SE: |
Default settings using the latest build. |
| Unreal Tournament 2003: |
Using the built-in benchmarking app in the downloaded demo, we ran the BotMatch & Flyby at 1024x768 |
| Aquamark3: |
Default Settings |
| Sysmark 2004: |
Office Productivity and Internet Content Creation |
| 3D Workstation: |
SpecView Perf 7.11 at default settings. |
If you would like for us to add any additional benchmarking software, please email us at suggestions@tbreak.com. Lets get started
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