To be able to use Cool’n’Quiet technology, you will need the following:

1. AMD Athlon 64 3200+ processor supporting Cool’n’Quiet. These CPUs marking ends up with “AP”.



2. Mainboard supporting Cool’n’Quiet technology.



3. Operation system supporting ACPI 2.0 specification.

If you have all that at hand, you should update the processor driver (you can download the driver from AMD site, just click here).

Then you should enable any of the power consumption management algorithms in your OS other than Home/Office Desk and Always On:

Of course, like any other new technology Cool’n’Quiet is not absolutely bugless yet. For instance, AMD warns that with enabled Cool’n’Quiet your CPU may sometimes fail to return to the nominal settings if the processor workload dashes up too rapidly. However, they claim that the problem will be completely solved in the new upcoming driver versions.

Testbed and Methods

The major goal of our test session will be to find out how fast the new AMD Athlon 64 3200+ can actually be. For this purpose we compared the performance of our processor with that of Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz, Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.2GHz, AMD Athlon XP 3200+ and AMD Athlon 64 FX-51. Besides, we also added the results for AMD Opteron 146 processor working at the same 2GHz frequency as Athlon 64 3200+, but featuring the dual-channel memory controller similar to that used in Athlon 64 FX. It will allow us to evaluate how big is the contribution of the dual-channel memory controller to the overall performance of Athlon 64 FX.

So, our testbeds were built with the following equipment:

• CPUs: AMD Athlon 64 FX-51 (2.2GHz), AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz), AMD Athlon XP 3200+ (2.2GHz, 400MHz FSB), Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz (800MHz FSB), Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.2GHz (800MHz FSB);
• Mainboards: ASUS P4C800 Deluxe (i875P), ASUS SK8N (NVIDIA nForce3 Pro 150), ASUS K8V Deluxe (VIA K8T800), ABIT NF7-S 2.0 (NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400);
• Memory: 1024MB DDR400 SDRAM (2 x 512MB, 2-2-2-5), 1024MB Registered DDR400 SDRAM (2 x 512MB, 2.5-3-3-5);
• NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra graphics card (Detonator 45.23);
• Western Digital WD400JB HDD.

Notes:

• In all cases the memory worked in the fastest mode with the minimal timings possible for each particular configuration. This way, the systems requiring Registered memory worked with DDR400 with 2-2-2-5 timings, and the timings for Athlon 64 FX based system were set to 2.5-3-3-5, because faster memory modules are not available in the market yet.
• The tests were run in Windows XP SP1 with DirectX 9.0b installed, unless specified otherwise.