AMD's Athlon 64 3400+: Death of the FX-51
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 6, 2004 4:35 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
DivX Encoding Performance
We have been using a DivX encoding test as a part of our CPU benchmarking suite for quite some time now, however the performance test has never been truly realistic as it wasn't geared towards producing a high quality DivX rip - rather it was designed to stress CPU performance.
We have since revised our benchmark and now follow the DivX 5 encoding guide published at Doom9.net . For our test title we use Chapter 9 from The Sum of All Fears DVD. We conduct a 2-pass encoding process and report the encoded FPS from both passes averaged together. The results are lower than our previous Xmpeg tests, however they are much more applicable to real-world usage.
Hyper-Threading along with other features of the NetBurst architecture give Intel the performance advantage in video encoding as you can see by our DivX results above. The Athlon 64 3400+ performs respectably but it isn't the CPU that's best for these sorts of tasks.
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Jeff7181 - Tuesday, January 6, 2004 - link
I found fault with the article... no FS2004 benchmark. Can I have it please? :DJeff7181 - Tuesday, January 6, 2004 - link
I agree with everyone so far =)But I think AMD may have shot themselves in the foot by releasing the 3400+, which performs exactly the same as the insanely priced FX-51. Unless they have some tricks up their sleeve with socket 939 that will improve performance, why would anyone spend twice the money on the FX-51 when the 3400+ provides 98% of the performance of the FX-51?
Jason Clark - Tuesday, January 6, 2004 - link
The print article issue is fixed.Cheers
AlexWade - Tuesday, January 6, 2004 - link
I liked the compile times benchmark! Please have it all new reviews of CPU's.PrinceXizor - Tuesday, January 6, 2004 - link
Nice review! I especially liked the price/performance charts. It should be interesting to see how AMD handles the transition from 754 to 939 sockets.The thing I find most impressive is that AMD is staying ahead of Intel as far as performance, something many of us did not think possible given Hammer's seemingly endless wait.
Intel had to rush out an EE version to remain competitive while it waited for Prescott (I'm not intel bashing, I'm sure Prescott will compete nicely).
In the meantime, AMD is the one hitting the "3400+" performance arena before the 3.4Ghz Prescotts hit. The question always was, can AMD execute with the Athlon 64 as well as they did with the Athlon XP? The answer seems to be yes. Very well done AMD!
P-X
Insomniac - Tuesday, January 6, 2004 - link
I meant hints. ;)Insomniac - Tuesday, January 6, 2004 - link
Nice article. Any hits on how the battle will look when Prescott hits? :)I noticed in the print view, none of the charts are showing up.
FearoftheNight - Tuesday, January 6, 2004 - link
great review...hope to see socket 939 coverage coming soon :D