AMD's 760 Chipset: DDR for the Athlon is here

New Test Bed & New Benchmarks

We recently conducted a Poll on the AnandTech Front Page that asked readers what they would like to see more of in our CPU reviews.  There was an overwhelming demand for more analysis in the reviews, and while this AMD 760 review isn’t entirely a CPU review, we are introducing a brand new test bed and testing methodology starting with this review.

For starters, the test bed gets a couple of upgrades.  We are still using the GeForce2 GTS (32MB) as our video card of choice, however we are upgrading the memory and hard drive on the test bed.  It is finally time for our CPU review test bed to feature 256MB of memory to limit the amount of disk swapping that occurs during the more complex tests, especially the new ones we have added to our test suite. 

With the introduction of the AMD 766 South Bridge and the VIA 686B which will shortly be available, this will mean that all of the popular chipsets will have native Ultra ATA/100 support.  In order to take advantage of this we have switched our CPU test bed hard drive from the aging 20.5GB ATA/66 IBM Deskstar DPTA-372050 to a 30GB ATA/100 IBM Deskstar 75GXP.  We reviewed this drive not too long ago and discovered that it has quite stellar performance, and thus we have adopted it for use in our CPU and platform tests.  It also helps us to better test the IDE controllers on platforms and expose any weaknesses.

In terms of our test suite, we have seen some upgrades there as well.  While we will continue to benchmark under Windows 98SE and Windows 2000, we will only be running our gaming suite under Windows 98SE.  All other benchmarks will be reserved for Windows 2000.  Speaking of which, we will start using Windows 2000 SP1 for all of our Win2K benchmarks as well. 

Under Windows 98SE the following Gaming Benchmarks are run, all at a 32-bit color depth (demo used in parentheses):

Quake III Arena (demo001) – 640 x 480 & 1024 x 768

UnrealTournament (thunder) – 640 x 480 & 1024 x 768

MDK2 (built in timedemo) – 640 x 480 & 1024 x 768

Expendable (built in timedemo) – 640 x 480

The reason for the switch to 32-bit color testing alone is because we have noticed that with the GeForce2 GTS, the performance limitations provided by switching to 32-bit rendering aren’t great enough to influence CPU performance to any major degree.  The Expendable demo isn’t run at 1024 x 768 since it is only used as a measure of cache/system memory performance and not as a gauge of real world performance like all of the other 1024 x 768 numbers.

Under Windows 2000 SP1 the following benchmarks are run at a resolution of 1024 x 768 x 16:

BAPCo SYSMark 2000

Ziff Davis Content Creation Winstone 2000

Ziff Davis High End Winstone 99

I-STREAM & FPU-STREAM

HD-Tach 2.61 (HDD controller max performance)

Distributed.net’s RC5 “Long” Benchmark

SPECviewperf 6.1.2 is also run under Windows 2000 SP1 however the resolution is set to 1280 x 1024 x 32 here in order to simulate a real world usage environment for the type of applications viewperf illustrates performance for. 

Windows 2000 SP1 benchmarks are generally a few percent faster than their Windows 98SE counterparts making running both sets of tests very redundant and thus useless.  You won’t see the performance standings of a group of CPUs change just because you’re running an application under Windows 98SE instead of Windows 2000 SP1. 

In order to make sure that the platform isn’t behaving oddly under Windows 2000 SP1 or Windows 98SE we run a set of platform comparison benchmarks to illustrate any driver/chipset issues that need to be addressed by the manufacturer.