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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skiboysteve - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
On the Business winstone 2004..."The Pentium 4 550 and Athlon 64 3800+ tie in the middle, while the 3400+ offers statistically similar performance."
No they didnt.
microAmp - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Very nice article, loved the L2 cache and memory comparisons at the end.thermalpaste - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Way back in 2000, I felt that Intel was doing something stupid by introducing the Willamette.The thunderbird was faster than the p-III coppermine at the same clock speeds, but considering that the p-III just had 2 parallel FPUs compared to the 3 on the athlon. An additional FPU would have helped of course. though the P-III core was not able to sustain higher clock speeds , intel could have redesigned a marginally deeper pipeline on the same core rather than designing the pentium-4 with a mammoth 20 stage pipeline.
Now the prescotts come with a 30-odd stage pipeline, but the integer unit runs at twice the speed which doesn't make the 7th generation of processors from intel very 'scalable'. Besides the processor heats upto 70 odd degrees with consummate ease (Im staying in India where the avg. room temperature is something like 29 degrees Celsius) and is not overclocker friendly.
I am waiting for the newer chips from Intel, based on the Pentium-M a.k.a the P6 architecture.
AMD is way ahead of Intel as of now.
skiboysteve - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Athlon 64 4000+ - 2.4GHz - 1MB - 128-bitAthlon 64 3800+ - 2.4GHz - 512KB - 128-bit
Athlon 64 3400+ - 2.4GHz - 1MB - 64-bit
Athlon 64 3400+ - 2.4GHz - 512KB - 64-bit
Athlon 64 FX-53 - 2.4GHz - 1MB - 128-bit
these numbers look off.
Your saying there are two s754 3400+, and one has more cache?
eva2000 - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
why leave out the 3700+ s754 1MB from suhc a nice comparison :)miketheidiot - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
excellent article. I agree with #2 that I would have liked to see an overclocking comparison, or at least a quick demonstation of the 4000 and fx-55. Still a great article though.GhandiInstinct - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
We can always marvel at them but the prices, realistcaly speaking is a waste of our time. I'm as interested in the FX-55 as much as the IBM super-computer blue.Zac42 - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
I especially liked the comparrison of the equally priced value procs at the end of the article. Nice way to sum up the graphs. Good overall comparison, as you guys have just about any possible app one could use on a PC. Now we just need an OC comparrison, and we will be set!DrMrLordX - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Nice article so far, still reading it, but I would like to know where the 925XE chipset-based P4 board was in this review? Are those available to you guys yet? Just wondering.