.09 Athlon 64: Value, Speed and Overclocking
by Wesley Fink on October 14, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Gaming Performance
Gaming Performance was consistently faster on the new 90nm than the existing 130nm processors. This varied from 2% in Aquamark3 and Doom3 to 7% in Quake 3. Overall, gaming averaged about 3% faster on the new 90nm chips. While 3% is not a huge increase and it will likely not even be noticed by the average user, it was still impressive to see the new 90nm chips perform a little better than the older 130nm chips.
We have talked in past reviews about how some games respond well to CPU and memory speed increases, while others seem to be most influenced by the graphics card. This is nicely illustrated in comparing benchmarks of the 3000+ at stock speed to the same benches at 2.6GHz (290x9). Here, we see games like Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Unreal Tournament 2003, Quake 3, and Comanche 4 improve 34% to 42% as we move from 1.8Ghz to 2.6Ghz. At the other end of the spectrum, Halo and Aquamark 3 only improve 12% to 13% while the CPU speed increases 45%. Doom 3 falls in the middle with a 24% increase in frame rate for the 45% boost in CPU speed.
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ViRGE - Thursday, October 14, 2004 - link
I agree with #3, some more numbers would be nice, preferably at least one Northwood, a Prescott, and a S754 3400+(2.4ghz).IceWindius - Thursday, October 14, 2004 - link
Wow, I wonder what types of memory will work best with the Athlons in the .90 die size? I'd love to be able to get a 3000+ at 2.6 and have extra money in my pocket for other things! Sucks that nForce 4 won't have AGP for my 6800GT so I'll just get a Asus A8V and stay with AGP for one more generation.Go AMD go, I can't wait to get rid of my intel setup and go back to my one and only AMD!
Myrandex - Thursday, October 14, 2004 - link
Sweet article and good results. 90nm is predicted in my near future.Bugler - Thursday, October 14, 2004 - link
Thank you for the write of AnandTech. We have been waiting for some guidance and this is much appreciated. I will probably buy the rest of my AMD build (motherboard and CPU) next weeks. The rest of the parts have arrived. Was just waiting on an assessment of the 90nm chips.ariafrost - Thursday, October 14, 2004 - link
And I thought the days of nearly 50% overclocks were long gone (I had a Celeron 300A @ 450MHz waaayy back)...My next proc will be a 939 90nm part, and mobo will be Nforce 4 :)
ModFX - Thursday, October 14, 2004 - link
Nice finally be able to afford a socket 939 just got to wait to some NForce 4 boards come out and have revision 2 so they have 1GHz HT.Theres a couple of other typos such as saying "but they confirmed that the AMD 130nm process appears to run at least as cool as current 130nm processors."
I believe it should have said on the first 130nm (90nm).
xsilver - Thursday, October 14, 2004 - link
I'm having problems finding benchies that compare these new cpus with my current rig.... how much of a performance gap are we talking about over a 3.0 northwood? 50%?Decoder - Thursday, October 14, 2004 - link
Thanks for this super article. My next upgrade will be a AMD64 3000+ on a NForce 4 board! Kudos to AMD.Degrador - Thursday, October 14, 2004 - link
These look like great chips - I'd say my next processor will be a 90nm 3000+.Btw, you've got the table a little screwy for overclocking - the processor speeds are labelled the wrong way around, and for the 3000+ overclock it should be 2592 (assuming 288x9).