X-bit labs

AMD Athlon 64 3000+ CPU Review: AMD64 to the Masses! (page 8)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 12/28/2003 | 08:53 PM ]

Athlon 64 3000+ demonstrates pretty good results in gaming applications. It is only 3-5% behind the Athlon 64 3200+ with twice as large L2 cache. It also looks quite attractive against the background of Intel Pentium 4 processor. In almost 50% of these tests, the new AMD CPU manages to defeat even Pentium 4 3.2GHz. And in the games, which usually favor Athlon processors, such as Unreal Tournament 2003 or Tomb Raider, Athlon 64 3000+ outperforms even Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition.

Overclocking Athlon 64 3000+ to 2.2GHz appears quite advantageous and improves the performance by another 7-8%. It is not only higher CPU clock frequency that contributes to the performance improvement here, but also faster memory, higher working frequencies of HyperTransport and AGP buses. Overclocking makes our hero run as fast as Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, although it still fails to catch up with the Athlon 64 FX-51 working at 2.2GHz and featuring 1MB L2 cache and dual-channel memory controller.

As for the performance ratio between the overclocked Athlon 64 working at 2.2GHz and featuring twice as small L2 cache, and the Athlon 64 3200+ with the full 1MB L2 cache and 2.0GHz core clock, we can see that the additional 200MHz do matter much more for the performance than another 512KB of the L2 cache memory. As a result, AMD Athlon 64 3000+ overclocked to 2.2GHz outperforms Athlon 64 3200+ with the nominal frequency of 2.0GHz in all gaming tests.