Testbed and Methods

The major goal of this test session was to find out how fast the new Socket 939 processors from AMD turned out and to compare their performance with what their predecessors as well as their competitors from Intel showed.

As for the predecessors, the situation here is pretty clear, I should say: the newcomers will not be able to avoid the comparison with Athlon 64 3800+. And as for the competing products, the situation here turned out somewhat tricky. Since AMD started developing its Athlon 64 CPU family pretty actively, and Intel is in hurry to introduce its new Pentium 4 CPUs, the market turned out somewhat misbalanced. The today’s fastest AMD processors selling for about $700 do not have any direct competitors in the market now. The top Pentium 4 model working at 3.6GHz is now selling for a much smaller sum of money: only $417. Therefore, the today’s comparison between the top Athlon 64 solutions and the existing top Pentium 4 processors should be taken quite relatively: as I have already said these solutions belong to different weight categories and sell at too different retail prices to be compared directly.

As for Athlon 64 FX, the situation here is just the opposite: the competitor solution, Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, costs more than the AMD CPU targeted for extreme gaming enthusiasts. This way, when we look at the benchmark results, we should keep in mind that these processors also belong to different price groups.

The testbeds used in our today’s session were configured as follows:

• CPUs:
• AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 (Socket 939, 1024KB L2);
• AMD Athlon 64 4000+ (Socket 939, 1024KB L2);
• AMD Athlon 64 3800+ (Socket 939, 512KB L2);
• Intel Pentium 4 560 (LGA775, 3.6 GHz);
• Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4GHz (LGA775);
• Mainboards:
• ASUS A8V Deluxe (Socket 939, VIA K8T800 Pro);
• ASUS P5AD2 Premium (LGA775, i925X Express).
• Memory:
• 1024MB DDR400 SDRAM (Corsair CMX512-3200XLPRO, 2 x 512MB, 2-2-2-10);
• 1024MB DDR2-533 SDRAM (OCZ PC2 4300, 2 x 512MB, 4-4-4-10).
• Graphics cards:
• Sapphire RADEON X800 XT (AGP 8x);
• Sapphire RADEON X800 XT (PCI Express x16).
• Disk subsystem:
• Maxtor MaXLine III 250GB (SATA150).

We ran all the tests in MS Windows XP SP2 operation system with the installed DirectX 9.0c pack. The testbeds were set for maximum performance. Note that, we increased the Cycle Time (Tras) timing for Athlon 64 up to 10, because our experience suggests that the memory controller of Athlon 64 processor works more efficiently in this case, than in case this setting equals 5.