OCZ 3700EB: Making Hay with Athlon 64

AMD Athlon 64 Performance Test Configuration

The recently introduced nForce3-250 and VIA K8T800 PRO chipsets finally bring a working PCI/AGP lock to Athlon 64. Earlier chipsets only had a working AGP/PCI lock on a handful of boards, such as the AOpen AK89 Max. Thus far, we have tested the Epox, MSI, Chaintech, and Gigabyte nF3-250 chipset motherboards and found a working AGP lock on all boards. The working AGP/PCI lock allows effective testing of Athlon 64 memory performance.

All test conditions were as close as possible to those used in our earlier memory reviews.

Athlon 64 Performance Test Configuration
Processor(s):	AMD Athlon 64 3200+
RAM:	1 x 512MB OCZ 3700EB (DS)
Hard Drives:	Seagate 120GB IDE 7200 RPM (8MB Buffer)
PCI/AGP Speed:	Fixed at 33/66
Chipset Drivers:	nVidia Platform Drivers 4.24 (May 10, 2004)
Video Card(s):	ATI 9800 PRO 128MB, 128MB aperture, 1024x768x32
Video Drivers:	ATI Catalyst 4.5
Power Supply:	Vantec Stealth 470 Watt Aluminum
Operating System(s):	Windows XP Professional SP1
Motherboards:	Chaintech VNF3-250 with Beta Bios 5/07/04

In our testing with nForce3-250 boards, we found that the best performance with OCZ 3700EB was achieved at a tRas setting of 10. All Performance Tests were run with a 10 setting.

Test Settings

The Athlon 64 also has the unique feature of unlocked multipliers below the rated speed, which is not available on current Pentium 4 processors. The unlocked lower ratios combined with a working AGP lock makes it possible to take a different approach to testing memory performance on the Athlon 64. The AGP/PCI lock makes it possible to look at a fixed Processor speed and variable Memory speeds to see the real impact of just higher memory speeds on typical performance.

The standard Quake 3 (Open GL), Super PI (raw calculation performance), SiSoft Sandra 2004 Standard Buffered memory test (synthetic memory test), and SiSoft Sandra 2004 Standard UNBuffered memory test were run as usual. However, to test more effectively the effect of memory speed on performance, we expanded the benchmarks used for testing. UT2003 (Direct X 8) and Aquamark 3 (Direct X 9) were added to the memory tests to provide a broader range of performance measurements.