X-bit labs

X-bit Watch: AMD Athlon FX-51 Beats Dual Apple G5.

Category: Other

by Grigoriy Gubankov

[ 10/20/2003 | 07:56 AM ]

OCWorkbench web-site has done a review of ABIT Small Form Factor PC called DiGiDice. We told  you about the announcement of this barebone system quite some time ago, but OCWorkbench in my memory was the first online publication to review the babe. ABIT’s box features extensive expansion capabilities and filled with interesting technologies, which make the barebone rather exciting from a lot of points of view. OCWorkbench guys were generally pleased with the system, though, they noticed some difficulties with the PC assembly coming from imperfection of case and mainboard design. Read the review over here. 

The world’s largest NVIDIA-related web-site called nV-News has an interview with Diane Vanasse, a Public Relations Manager for Mobile Division of NVIDIA Corporation. The spokesperson covers a lot of aspects of NVIDIA GeForce Go-series products, such as peculiarities of PowerMizer technology, Video Processing Engine and a lot more. Read the whole batch of questions and answers over here. 

Several months ago we wrote a couple of news-stories about Apple and its claims about the performance of its G5 processor (see this and this one). If you remember, there is one interesting peculiarity of Apple’s statements in respect of performance of the G5 – there are no comparisons with AMD processors. In fact, we have never had an opportunity to directly compare performance of Apple and AMD processors in certain applications. Fortunately, thanks to a PCWorld article we now have a picture of relative performance between Apple G5, Intel Pentium 4, AMD Athlon FX and Athlon 64 processors. PCWorld characterized the situation by one simple phrase “Athlon 64 vs. Apple G5 Systems: Not Even Close”. Apparently, DualG5 system managed to beat single-processor AMD systems in only one benchmark – “Photoshop 7.0.1” and even in this benchmark it was slightly outperformed by a Dual-Opteron workstation. To tell the truth, the number of benchmarks does not let us to draw strong conclusion, but these benchmarks are able to show that Apple system can be beaten even in video- and image-editing software, particularly in Adobe Premiere and Adobe Photoshop, which are often referred as “Apple’s favorites”. Read the whole article here. View comparative chart here. 

If you are a hardcore gamer and use an NVIDIA-based of graphics cards, head on to Warp2Search, since the boys had managed to grab a bunch of new Detonator drivers, such as Detonator 52.14 and Detonator 52.16. Download them at your own risk here. By the way, 3DCenter.de also has a review of NVIDIA Detonator 52.10, 52.14 over here.  

PC4200 Enhanced Latency memory modules announced by OCZ just a couple of days ago  have been reviewed by AnandTech. Our colleagues were extremely pleased with those abilities – the modules managed to work as PC3200 with aggressive timings (2-3-3-5) and, in the same time, overclocked very well with conservative timings. AnandTech concludes that OCZ’s PC4200EL memory “gives it all to the buyer” and looking at the test results it is hard to dispute that. Read AnandTech’s article here. 

Sudhian Media has posted a rather unusual article – they compared performance of graphics cards that use conventional PCI interface. At first sight, it is a rather unpractical comparison, but some quite actual systems from major PC vendors (Dell 4500S, for example) do not have AGP-slot for cost-reduction purposes, thus, PCI-cards would be a good option of upgrade for such systems. Sudhian concluded that the fastest performing PCI graphics card is the RADEON 9100 128MB, while the most feature-rich is probably the GeForce FX 5600-based solution. You can read the whole review here.