AMD Athlon 64 4000+ & FX-55: A Thorough Investigation
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 19, 2004 1:04 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
The Test
In addition to our usual tests we've included PC World's WorldBench 5, an application based test suite much like Winstone and SYSMark that incorporates many popular applications. Unlike the aforementioned benchmarks, WorldBench does not test multitasking power, rather focusing on single application performance, making it very complementary to our existing benchmarks.
Our hardware configurations are similar what we've used in previous comparisons, with one addition - our Athlon 64 testbed now uses the recently released nForce4 chipset. For a review of that chipset read our own Wesley Fink's review of NVIDIA's latest chipset with SLI support.
AMD Athlon 64 Configuration
Socket-939 Athlon 64 CPUs
2 x 512MB OCZ PC3200 EL Dual Channel DIMMs 2-2-2-10
NVIDIA nForce4 Reference Motherboard
ATI Radeon X800 XT PCI Express
AMD Athlon XP Configuration
Athlon XP 3200+
2 x 512MB OCZ PC3200 EL Dual Channel DIMMs 2-2-2-10
ASUS A7N8X Deluxe nForce2 400 Motherboard
ATI Radeon X800 XT AGP
Intel Pentium 4 Configuration
LGA-775 Intel Pentium 4 and Extreme Edition CPUs
2 x 512MB Crucial DDR-II 533 Dual Channel DIMMs
3-3-3-12
Intel 925X Motherboard
ATI Radeon X800 XT PCI Express
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RaistlinZ - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
I may have missed it, but does anyone know if the Athlon 64 4000+ will be multiplier unlocked like the FX-53 is? That's the only thing I see that would differentiate the two chips.RaistlinZ - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Illissius - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Re: the necessity of Prescott. You are missing one very important consideration: Prescott has iAMD64 support. (Although it is currently disabled, no doubt because Intel has intentions of selling you the same processor twice). A simple die shrink of Northwood would not.I half suspect one of the reasons for Prescott's problems could be that AMD's 64-bit extensions don't mesh very well with a Netburst architecure, but they had to shoehorn it in anyways, and had to make a lot of unappealing design decisions in the process. (I've never designed a processor, though, so this is just baseless speculation.) I'd be interested in seeing 64-bit enabled chips on a Pentium M architecture...
CrystalBay - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Moores law is dead...:(Runamile - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Awsome read. Great Job. And HOLY COW does Intel get their a$$ handed to them!I would of liked to see some price/performance curves too. That would of summed it up quite nicely.
hertz9753 - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Athlon 64 3700+ 2.4GHz 1MB 64-bitAthlon 64 3400+ 2.4GHz 512KB 64-bit
Athlon 64 3400+ 2.2GHz 1MB 64-bit
araczynski - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
nice, but luckily i still see no reason to upgrade my 2.4@3.3, at least not for a few measly benchmark FPS.hertz9753 - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
AlphaFox - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Id like to see some kind of comparison with an OC XP Mobile. I have one runing at 2.46ghz and not really sure how it stacks up here...PrinceGaz - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
An excellent article, well done.About the only thing missing was a bit of overclocking of the FX-55 to see if the introduction of strained silicon considerably increased the headroom. Obviously it has allowed them to ship parts rated at 2.6GHz which they weren't previously able to do, but how much better is the FX-55 compared to a CG-stepping FX-53? Does the use of strained silicon mean the FX-55 is a new stepping?