AMD Athlon 64 3800+ and FX-53: The First 939 CPUs
by Derek Wilson on June 1, 2004 12:30 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Comparing CPUs: 3400+ and 3500+
There have been plenty of rumors trickling out from around the globe that seem to indicate that the 3500+ is a slower processor overall than the 3400+. Of course, answering the question of whether or not the new naming scheme is simply marketing distinction for the new socket, or an actually deserved rating is a question we have strived to answer through these tests. If we step up and take a look at most of the benchmarks we ran, we will see these percent differences:
As we can see, six or seven of the benchmarks are at or around the 2% mark we were looking for in calling this part deserving of its performance rating. Most of the other benchmarks still show an increase in performance over the 3400+ even if its not as much as we would like to see, and only two benchmarks show a decrease in performance. There is a good mix of games, encoding, and compiling (and the content creation winstone is close enough) that show the increases we would expect, and things like DX9 games (graphics limited) and 3D rendering don't always scale the way we would expect. It seems that Lightwave and Business Winstone are very sensitive to cache size, in spite of the increased memory bandwidth provided by the dual channel memory interface.
When all is said and done, it is clear that the 3500+ is a better performer than the 3400+ on average. But what else could AMD have done, call it a 3450+? Well, maybe their still holding on to that card for a reason, and maybe their tests show that the 2.2GHz 512kB caches dual channel unbuffered CPU really does deserve a rating of 3500+. There is really not enough data to point toward the 3500+ not living up to its name to get upset with AMD about the rating number.
It is our opinion that the 3500+ is solid performer that is at least not undeserving of its name. And we have a good feeling that overclocking performance may also help to seal the deal, but we'll have to wait on a final verdict in that arena until we actually get our hands on a 3500+ and aren't reduced to underclocking a 3800+.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
38 Comments
View All Comments
Icewind - Tuesday, June 1, 2004 - link
Slight gramatical problem here......As we have mentioned in previous news articles, these new CPUs will run at the 3500+ will run at 2.2GHz while the 3800+ and FX-53 will run at 2.4 GHz each.
I think you wanted to say "These new CPU"S will be starting at the 3500+ model running at 2.2ghz to the 3800+ running at 2.4ghz."
Viditor - Tuesday, June 1, 2004 - link
"I have updated the article to reflect the fact that we did indeed run our tests with 1T timings on the MSI K8T800 Pro 939 board"Thanks Derek...that's why I always read you guys!
WBurton - Tuesday, June 1, 2004 - link
I'm getting a bit frustrated with the Sponsored Links constantly crashing my Opera 7.x. It'd be nice to review an article without having to reboot all the time.MIDIman - Tuesday, June 1, 2004 - link
Is it possible that the release of a 64-bit OS will change all of these numbers and conlcusions?Lonyo - Tuesday, June 1, 2004 - link
1066MHz HT bus?I thought the HT bus ram 200xmult
So isn't it 200x5, or 1000MHz?
(Typo on the first page?)
boban10 - Tuesday, June 1, 2004 - link
what i dont like about many review sites that they encoding always the same codec and then say p4 is faster.well look here how they test it:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1603531...
i hope that your and anandtech next reviews will be more in depth about encoding, cause if people read your reviews about encoding they will buy p4.
but p4 is not faster in all encoding and that is important to say and test. and i like this site, but if next time i see again only one test in encoding (and that where is know that p4 win) then i will not read your page anymore. and no im not amd fan, im performance fan.
mechBgon - Tuesday, June 1, 2004 - link
Jeff7181, you asked "Is running four unbuffered DIMMs really that necessary?"I was running three 512MB modules on my A7N8X Deluxe before replacing it with my K8V Deluxe. That was working out nicely for what I was using it for. When I installed my A64 and K8V Deluxe, I stepped *down* to 1.0GB because if I used all three modules, it would want to run them at DDR200/PC1600 speeds. If I could add a fourth module for 2.0GB total, that would be a welcome improvement. Yeah, I could invest in two 1GB DIMMs, I guess...
Intel's i865 and i875 families have brought 4 DDR400 DIMMs to Pentium4 owners, and that capability, along with CSA Gigabit, are two places where I have to admit Intel trumped AMD & Co. nicely, and has kept them trumped for quite a while too. So it would be nice to see AMD get their mojo working here.
DerekWilson - Tuesday, June 1, 2004 - link
I have updated the article to reflect the fact that we did indeed run our tests with 1T timings on the MSI K8T800 Pro 939 board.I appologize for the omission.
Viditor - Tuesday, June 1, 2004 - link
I wonder if Derek caught the bios setting tweak that Aces found."An incredible difference: with a faster bus turnaround, the memory subsystem is able to serve up to 24% more bandwidth, and the latency goes down from 51 (21.25 ns) to 47 cycles (19.6 ns). This results in measurable real world performance gains:
In 3DS Max 5.1, we gained 3% of performance
In Medieval War, Comanche we also gained 3%
In Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, we gained 5.5%
In WinRAR and Plasma, the performance advantage was no less than 9%"
http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=65000305
nycxandy - Tuesday, June 1, 2004 - link
Which motherboard was used for the 939 processors?