Testbed and Methods

The current test session aimed at measuring the performance of the Socket 939 processors from AMD manufactured with the newer 90nm production technology and comparing that with the performance of the already existing 130nm solutions. The results of our benchmarks will be given for all CPUs on Winchester cores and we will also compare them with the results obtained for Socket 754 solutions and Socket 939 solutions with analogous ratings. Also, we added the performance results for the competing Pentium 4 processors, so that you could get a better vision of the market situation.

The testbeds involved into our testing session were configured as follows:

• CPUs:
• AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (Socket 939, Winchester);
• AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (Socket 939, Winchester);
• AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (Socket 939, Winchester);
• AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (Socket 939, NewCastle);
• AMD Athlon 64 3400+ (Socket 754, ClawHammer);
• AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (Socket 754, ClawHammer);
• AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (Socket 754, NewCastle);
• Intel Pentium 4 3.4E (Socket 478, Prescott);
• Intel Pentium 4 3.2E (Socket 478, Prescott);
• Intel Pentium 4 3.0E (Socket 478, Prescott);
• Intel Pentium 4 3.4 (Socket 478, Northwood);
• Intel Pentium 4 3.2 (Socket 478, Northwood);
• Intel Pentium 4 3.0 (Socket 478, Northwood);

• Mainboards:
• MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum (Socket 939, NVIDIA nForce3 250);
• EPoX EP-8KDA3+ (Socket 754, NVIDIA nForce3 250);
• ASUS P4C800 (Socket 478, i875P);
• 1024MB DDR400 SDRAM (Corsair CMX512-3200XLPRO, 2 x 512MB, 2-2-2-10);
• Sapphire RADEON X800 XT (AGP 8x) graphics card;
• Maxtor MaXLine III 250GB (SATA150) HDD.

The tests were run in MS Windows XP SP2 with installed DirectX 9.0c. The testbeds were adjusted for maximum performance. Note that we increased the Cycle Time (Tras) timing of Athlon 64 to 10, because according to our experience, the memory controller of Athlon 64 processor works more efficiently in this mode, than in case this setting equals 5.