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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HardwareD00d - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Fantastic article, obviously very well thought out.I would have liked to see a comparison between the 4000+ and the "real" FX-53 to really back up your rebadging theory (yeah I know speed+cache+memory width are equal between the two, but just to make sure AMD isn't pulling some magic out of there butt somewhere else).
Marsumane - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Yes, thanks for the XP comparison. I find it interesting how its not performing as well as it used to in games. (doom 3, farcry, cs:s)Also, your ut2k4 benches seem off. How is doom 3 pulling 50% more frames at the same res? Maybe your ut is at 16x12? I pull similar frames on ut w/ my 9800p oced.
ksherman - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
I like the ending... It sounds mysterious!alexruiz - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
I will suggest again to include some Ulead Video Studio 8.0 benchmarks for video encoding. Ulead is by far the fastest consumer grade video editor / renderer, it is the most complete and one of the most popular. In fact, it is almost 50% faster than Pinnacle 9, and almost 100% faster than videowave.Roxio has really been working with Intel as all previous version of video wave ran better on AMD hardware. As reference, results video wave 6 or 7 would be interesting. Newer doesn't always mean better, as you can see from Adobe Premiere. Version 7.0 is quite slower than 6.5 doing the exact same thing in the same platform.
For DivX encoding, a run with virtualdub/virtualdubmod or DVD2AVI would be nice, as they are very fast and extensively used.
Just some comments
Alex
Araemo - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Thank you thank you thank you for including an Athlon XP.This allows me to better judge where my current Barton 2.4 Ghz sits. ;P So I know when an upgrade to the next cheap overclocker will give a good enough performance boost to be worth the money.
stephenbrooks - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Here's an idea to play with: how about some 2D scatter plots of Performance/£ and Performance/Watt? Obviously not on everything - that would clutter it - but perhaps on one or two key things it'd be nice to see.Zar0n - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
EDIT #22 There is no 3400+ for SK 939 only 3500+Zar0n - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Nice article BUT:You should make C&C power consumption and temperature
Also some OC tests.
The Battle for Value is not correct:
1º WHAT about price of DDR1 VS DDR2?!
2º MB for INTEL are more expensive, ~40€ is a great difference in a MB price.
3º 0.09 AMD are just introduced so they are going to come down, not much but they are.
In order to be fair you should compare with AMD 3400+
AMD as a clear winner here.
mczak - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
power consumption at idle - is this with or without cool 'n' quiet (I suspect without)?Uff - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
I have to agree with #18 - it's not worth paying more than twice the price of a 3400+ just to get 3800+ on 939 platform.Many say 'OH! But s939 is more upgradable!', but if you think about it, by the time you upgrade next there are very likely going to be new motherboards available aswell and you end up upgrading that anyway. Not to mention motherboards cost virtually nothing compared to cpus.