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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Live - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Splendid reading! This site is doing a great job right now. I really would love more of these very informative articles that help you so at seeing the big picture.A really helpful article.
Disorganise - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
I’m a bit disappointed by you inconsistency…The comparison with Intel over who wins….slightly inconsistent but no biggie.
What really is bad though, is the penultimate page – is socket 939 worth it?
I agree it is but…..
You’ve taking an identical chip and found it about 5% quicker than on socket 754. OK, no problem. But AMD have wacked a whopping 12% increase in rating, to 3800+ from 3400+. It doesn’t gel, the numbers don’t work.
The 3800+ is also more expensive than the 3400+ to the tune of about 250% here in Australia and about 220% over there in the U.S. a 5% increase in performance does not warrant a doubling in price.
Dave
at80eighty - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
way to go Anand...excellently comprehensive article.../waiting for those HDD articles you promised : p
SLIM - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Going along with what #6 said:Athlon 64 4000+ - 2.4GHz - 1MB - 128-bit
Athlon 64 3800+ - 2.4GHz - 512KB - 128-bit
Athlon 64 3400+ - 2.4GHz - 1MB - 64-bit <---should be a socket 754 3700+ right?
Athlon 64 3400+ - 2.4GHz - 512KB - 64-bit
Athlon 64 FX-53 - 2.4GHz - 1MB - 128-bit
SLIM
ViRGE - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
#12, even GPUs aren't going anywhere fast. There's still a shortage of something or other needed to make the Ultra/PE parts, and there isn't a planned refresh for 2004. ATI/Nvidia have another speed grade of RAM to jump to(1.6ghz GDDR3), and can die-shrink down to 90nm once TSMC gets there, but they're so close to CPUs right now, they're destined to hit the same wall too.Anand, someone has been a busy beaver.;-) That was a long, but well thought out and informative article; you've basically written the definitive CPU article for now until the multicores come out.
Tides - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Ah I read the conclusion wrong.Tides - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
why is this site putting down an amd performance gain and making excuses for intel at the same time.Doormat - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Its a shame the processor wars are coming to an end. I see dual core as neat, but a dud performance wise. It'll be another year or two before the GPU wars start to die out... hmmm..-CPU performance levels off
-HD capacity levels off
The only interesting stuff going on is GPU stuff.
dvinnen - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Best artical from Anandtech I've read in a long time. Good job Anand.skiboysteve - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
wait nevermind, you put your comments ABOVE the graphs. threw me off cause this isnt what you usualy do...