Now let’s find out how efficient the 400MHz bus of Athlon XP processors will be in games.

Well, 3Dmark2001 SE is exactly the test where 400MHz bus of our Athlon XP is important. Thanks to faster processor bus even Athlon XP 3000+ outperforms Pentium 4 3.0 with 800MHz bus.

The newer 3DMark03 version also indicates that the faster bus provides a certain performance increase, although here it is too small to let Athlon XP beat Intel’s competitors.

CPU Score generated by the same benchmark is a nice test of the overall system performance. This parameter is very sensitive to the memory subsystems bandwidth and CPU computing capacities. And in this case faster processor bus of Athlon XP processor has a very good effect: the performance  gets about 10% higher, according to this benchmark.

The same picture appears in Return to Castle Wolfenstein game. The hypothetical Athlon XP 3200+ fails to outpace Pentium 4 with 800MHz bus.

But in Unreal Tournament 2003 the leadership belongs to AMD CPUs. Faster 400MHz bus only strengthens their positions here.

In the same game in Flyby test the 400MHz bus plays the major role. Due to this bus only, the upcoming Athlon XP 3200+ outperforms Pentium 4 3.0GHz.