AMD Athlon 64 4000+ & FX-55: A Thorough Investigation
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 19, 2004 1:04 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
An oldie but a goodie, Enemy Territory is still played quite a bit and makes for a great CPU test as today's GPUs can easily handle the rendering load of the Quake 3 based game.
We continue to see dominance from AMD, this time only the top three spots go to AMD chips. The Pentium 4 3.4EE and the Pentium 4 560 both manage to outperform the Athlon 64 3400+ thanks to its single channel memory configuration. ET also shows us a situation where the move to dual channel actually helps the Athlon 64 more than the 7% we've been seeing thus far, here an 11% boost is what we see - although there's barely any performance improvement from the larger cache of the 4000+.
Prescott does reasonably well here, but just not good enough to compete with AMD.
The Sims 2
While a clear departure from our usual game tests, The Sims 2 is more popular than any of the other games we've featured here in certain crowds - it is effectively the Doom 3 of those who prefer life-simulation to first person shooters. And interestingly enough, it makes for a very impressive CPU benchmark.
So who wins the hearts and performance of The Sims? AMD of course, with the top five performers in this test being Athlon 64 processors. Coming in 6th place is the Pentium 4 3.4EE, which is a whopping 21% slower than the Athlon 64 FX-55.
Granted most Sims players will not be shelling out $1,000 for a CPU, but given that the Athlon 64 3200+ can outperform the 3.4EE, they won't have to. Things are back to normal here with a 6% boost from Socket-939 and a minor 2% improvement when the Athlon 64 is given a full megabyte of cache.
Far Cry
Performance under Far Cry echoes what we've already seen, AMD takes the top four spots without much struggle from Intel. While there is some debate about which is the faster content creation chip, there's no debate that the Athlon 64 is the faster gaming chip.
Warcraft III
Although AMD comes out on top here, the performance lead is nothing to cheer about; with the exception of the Athlon XP 3200+, all of the contenders here are GPU bound and all play the game very well (including the Athlon XP).
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val - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
for me is AMD unacceptable until there are good chipsets. All i have ever seen or had in my computers was big garbage with permanent problems and mysterious difficulties.Even SIS chipsets looks much better for intel than SIS for AMD. Its not anymore about CPU, CPU are fast for many tasks and that few percent of price or performance makes no deal, but overall quality talks strongly for Intel.
Save your time AMD fanboys to reply me something like that your AMD platform runs perfect and you had problems with intel and so on, its cheap and cannot anyway motivate me for change.
And yes, i have 2 AMD and 2 Intel computers and many i had or seen before (at home, work, school, projects, customers).
Gnoad - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
3GHZ! Wow, I already was an AMD fan, but that just totally blows me away. Crazy stuff.GoHAnSoN - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
nice article. Thxcoldpower27 - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Very nice, I await the day AMD releases a 3GHZ Athlon 64. These processor are niced but priced in a range where volumes are rather low, they have nice bragging rights though :PDa DvD - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
3GHz on air :SAMD's really out of trouble for the coming year(s)
I can imagine K8@90nm scaling well beyond 3GHz...
(lol, or even top Prescott clockspeeds? That would be insane..)
Wesley Fink - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
#30 and #43 -Once AMD informed us that strained silicon was used in the FX55 I couldn't resist a bit of a run with overclocking the FX55. The nForce4 Reference boad is not really intended or designed for overclocking, since it doesn't have any CPU or memory voltage adjustments. However it does support a wide range of multipliers so I could try a few settinngs.
I had no probelm at all running at 14.5X or 2.9GHz at default voltage. At that speed I ran quite a few benchmarks and a Quake 3 of 604.2 FPS. The FX55 actually booted at 3.0GHz but it never made it through a stable XP boot. I suspect with just a bit of CPU voltage 3.0GHz would be possible with the FX55 on air. All cooling was just the new AMD stock fan which now includes copper fins and heat pipes.
verybusy - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
There is some FX55 and 4000+ overclocking info at http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.cfm?page=2&...Assuming that my request from above is granted regarding other overclocking of 3500+, 3200+ and 3000+, I'd like to see just how overclocking turns out with the retail heatsink and fan. I hope that's not too much of a request.
Thanks...
verybusy - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
I liked the review of the Athlon 64 4000+ and FX-55 and it was nice to see it compared to the other Athlon 64 3200+ and 3000+ processors running at stock speeds.Unfortulately, with this review following so closely behind the 3500+ and 3000+ review (.09 Athlon 64: Value, Speed and Overclocking), it would have been very useful to see the 3500+, 3200+ and 3000+ overclocked to 2.6GHz as well. Afterall, the .09 3500+/3000+ @290x9 is faster than the FX53 (2.4GHz-1MB) err I mean Athlon 64 4000+). The overclocked 3500+, 3200+ and 3000+ could be pretty much as quick as the FX55 couldn't it?
That's what I want to see anyway.
ViRGE - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
#39, Anand mentions that it's multiplier locked.Zebo - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Guys the 3400 newcastle is a way underated chip. It should have been, by all rights, called a 3600. I guess they did'nt want the 3500 to look bad agains a "old" 754 newcastle though.As for the review, total AMD performance domination at low relative speeds temps and power consumption.:) Youd have to be a fool to buy intels netburst crap right now.