nVidia nForce2 Ultra 400Gb: Fast LAN, Firewall, SATA, RAID for Athlon XP
by Wesley Fink on May 13, 2004 2:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Content Creation, General Usage, and Media Encoding
No one would claim that the Athlon XP 3200+ is at the same performance level as the Athlon 64 3200+, but it is still an excellent buy. This is particularly true since many 2500+ Barton chips, with the same 11 multiplier as the 3200+, will run at 400FSB (3200+ speed), and yet cost only about $70.
In 2004 Winstones, the 3200+ performs at about 90% of the performance of the Athlon 64 3200+. The XP architecture is not the best choice for media encoding, since Athlon 64 3200+ is 20% to 30% faster in our 2-pass encoding benchmark. PCMark 2004 uses encoding as part of the PCMark bench and shows the 3200+ XP at about 85% of the Athlon 64.
Considering the low prices of the Athlon XP, and the fact these will drop even more when Socket 939 appears next month, you still get a lot of bang-for-the-buck with Athlon XP. However, Athlon 64 is the clear performance winner by a wide margin.
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Myrandex - Thursday, May 13, 2004 - link
It woudl still be kinda disappointing to go out and purchase a brand new AthlonXP 3200+ system with this nvidia motherboard and later realize that there will be no further upgrades CPU wise. I have been pushing peopel to go to Athlon64 CPUs for that reason really, unless its an extreme budget situation.segagenesis - Thursday, May 13, 2004 - link
Extra features like SATA + Raid + Gigabit LAN on the chipset are a nice bonus. Kudos to nVidia for continuing to improve on features.psiu - Thursday, May 13, 2004 - link
Under final words it begins, "The Socket A Athlon 64 has not received the attention that the newer Athlon 64 chips have gotten in recent months, but the motherboards still sell in very large numbers for nVidia."That's supposed to be Socket A Athlon * XP *, right?
Anyway, neato! Happy to see that socket-A won't just up and disappear overnight, and features and performance are still being worked on for it.