Athlon Dual Core: Overclocking the 4200+
The official introduction of the Dual-Core or X2 Athlon 64 happened at Computex the first of this month. As you saw on AnandTech in AMD's Athlon 64 X2 4800+ & 4200+ Dual Core Performance Preview the performance of the AMD Dual-Core desktop was stellar. The pricing, however, was a little hard to swallow with the range from just over $500 for the lowest-priced 4200+ to around $1000 for the top-line 4800+.To refresh your memory, there are really very few differences between processors in the X2 line:
There are really just two speeds - 2.2GHz and 2.4Ghz - and either 512KB cache on each CPU or 1MB cache on each CPU. In addition nearly any Socket 939 motherboard can in theory run the new Dual-Core Athlons, as all that is required is a BIOS update.
Now that the Dual-Core AMD processors are starting to appear in the market, we have received many emails asking which X2 is the best value. With prices so high that is a very fair question. To shed some light on the answer we decided to take the X2 entry level $500 4200+ to the limit on our DFI nForce4 platform to see what we could really achieve with basic air cooling of the 4200+.
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Viditor - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - link
"$500 would get you started on an Intel i955 motherboard and cpu, so why would you invest in the end-of-the-road on AMD socket 939 and old DDR1? It's crazy"Because we're more interested in computers than space heaters? :-)
porkster - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - link
$500 would get you started on an Intel i955 motherboard and cpu, so why would you invest in the end-of-the-road on AMD socket 939 and old DDR1? It's crazy..
dumbnewbie - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - link
Can anyone speculate as to when a <12" laptop would be made with a dualcore (if at all)?LoneWolf15 - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - link
Would have been nice to see the X2 4400+ in this mix too. It would answer several questins:a)Do the 1MB caches make it harder to overclock, or does it still go as high as the 512k models?
b)Will the extra cache make for a worthwhile performance increase over the 512k model for the extra $50 or so, and if it does, which apps could benefit the most?
I think most of us won't be able to afford the $800-$1,000 chips, but if you're going to spend for the 4200+, you might consider spending the extra for the 4400+ if it yielded more benefits. It'd be worth knowing.
cryptonomicon - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - link
hmm, this isnt that interesting, except it shows that the chip can OC... but its logical to assume it could hit the 2.5-2.8ghz ceiling like most a64s on the market right now. it would have been impressive if it did 3g.now the more interesting thing was the TCCD overclock. to me this indicates that AMD has worked on creating a much more robust memory controller. that was the main weakness of the a64 chip, and with it improved, some amazing ram OCs will be possible.
yacoub - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - link
So is a 4200+ running at 2.64GHz a 5000+? :)Does that make a 4400+ at similar speeds a 5200+?
yacoub - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - link
*about to turn to Page 2*Sweet! I hope they stick Rome: Total War in their gaming test comparisons! I'd love to see if having a dual-core chip runs the game smoother during large battles, as that would directly influence my coming PC upgrade.
*skips ahead quickly to Gaming Performance page and looks at game titles on charts*
Oh well, maybe one day... =\
ceefka - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - link
Like Dubb said, it would be interesting to see how these X2's stack up against 2 CPU (Opteron and Xeon) workstations.I like the idea of a 4400+ in my new DAW. An X2 with the right chipset should be able to handle massive loads of multitrack audio, not just 5.1.
Wesley, can you do a Thonex in the next dual-core Intel vs AMD comparison? A 2-3 year old PC would be brought to its knees, it's quite a heavy thing. The point is to get that whole load to play at the least possible latency and compare CPU-loads. Please include a nF3 board also when you do get to this.
Diasper - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - link
Aboput my point earlier - of course at this stage it may be somewhat problematic to check against all those questions as alot of things eg gaming will be testing only 1CPU etc - but suffice to say some sort of projections should be able to be made when we might have a game drawing on both CPUS simultaneously.A challenge :)
Any game demos for dual cores out there to test against?
MAME - Thursday, June 23, 2005 - link
you should have included a stock 4800+ to the benchmarks for a good comparison