AMD Athlon 64 4000+ & FX-55: A Thorough Investigation
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 19, 2004 1:04 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
An oldie but a goodie, Enemy Territory is still played quite a bit and makes for a great CPU test as today's GPUs can easily handle the rendering load of the Quake 3 based game.
We continue to see dominance from AMD, this time only the top three spots go to AMD chips. The Pentium 4 3.4EE and the Pentium 4 560 both manage to outperform the Athlon 64 3400+ thanks to its single channel memory configuration. ET also shows us a situation where the move to dual channel actually helps the Athlon 64 more than the 7% we've been seeing thus far, here an 11% boost is what we see - although there's barely any performance improvement from the larger cache of the 4000+.
Prescott does reasonably well here, but just not good enough to compete with AMD.
The Sims 2
While a clear departure from our usual game tests, The Sims 2 is more popular than any of the other games we've featured here in certain crowds - it is effectively the Doom 3 of those who prefer life-simulation to first person shooters. And interestingly enough, it makes for a very impressive CPU benchmark.
So who wins the hearts and performance of The Sims? AMD of course, with the top five performers in this test being Athlon 64 processors. Coming in 6th place is the Pentium 4 3.4EE, which is a whopping 21% slower than the Athlon 64 FX-55.
Granted most Sims players will not be shelling out $1,000 for a CPU, but given that the Athlon 64 3200+ can outperform the 3.4EE, they won't have to. Things are back to normal here with a 6% boost from Socket-939 and a minor 2% improvement when the Athlon 64 is given a full megabyte of cache.
Far Cry
Performance under Far Cry echoes what we've already seen, AMD takes the top four spots without much struggle from Intel. While there is some debate about which is the faster content creation chip, there's no debate that the Athlon 64 is the faster gaming chip.
Warcraft III
Although AMD comes out on top here, the performance lead is nothing to cheer about; with the exception of the Athlon XP 3200+, all of the contenders here are GPU bound and all play the game very well (including the Athlon XP).
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coolme - Monday, January 10, 2005 - link
#85 yeah, but when comparing to Tom's Hardware review, it's totally off track... (Tom's is more believeble because there is pics of how he measured it and based on the fact that there is no way a A64 could handle 200+ watts)http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041115/pentium4...
how Tom tested it: http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041115/pentium4...
eight - Monday, December 27, 2004 - link
Has anyone information about A64 performance with Premiere Pro 1.5? I assume thet A64 does beat P4, but assumption is mother of... :)euanw - Tuesday, November 9, 2004 - link
#44Wesley,
I am very impressed by your articles. Can you inform me of the procedure you used to overclock the FX55? With the Neo2 board I am not clear on CPU vid and CPU voltage, what do they mean? When I change the multiplier to 13.5 my new PC reaches winXP and then reboots.
My setup is MSI K8N-Neo2-54G, FX-55, 2 x 512MB - OCZ EL DDR PC-3200 Platinum Rev2, Nvidia Quadro FX3000, 2x Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 120 GB, Matrox RTX-100 real time video editor, Antec TrueBlue 480W ATX-12V, BenQ DVD Dual DW1610, WinXP-SP2.
euanw - Tuesday, November 9, 2004 - link
#44Wesley,
Gioron - Sunday, October 24, 2004 - link
While I'm unsure of the exact method used in this review, I'm sure that there is no built-in power measurement devices on the motherboards and processors listed (unless its new and no one told me...) so its NOT just just a matter of installing software that can read a sensor thats already there (as in all the CPU temp monitors). This means it requires some hardware to measure the voltage and current flow to various components (or you can cheat a little and assume the voltage is constant and just measure current).Unfortunately, this is not as easy as it sounds, since isolating various components can be a problem. Its fairly easy to measure things like hard drive power useage since there is only one power connector going to it and its easy to access, so you measure the current on the 5v line and the current on the 12v line, and you're pretty much done. Things like CPUs, motherboards and graphics cards are a bit more difficult. On the newer graphics cards you can measure the power consumption from the additional molex connector, but in all likelyhood, the card will also draw a certain amount of power from the AGP slot power lines, and no one in their right mind is going to unsolder the AGP slot and raise it half an inch in an attempt to put a current sensor in line with the power leads. Thus, you need to rely on indirect means and educated guesses. You can measure the current going into the motherboard, but how much of that is going to the chipset, the CPU, the RAM and the graphics card? You can swap in a different CPU and see how it changes, but that won't give you absolute readings. You can try to remove the CPU and see what power the MB uses without one, but odds are it'll use more power when its actually interfacing with a CPU instead of beeping error codes at you.
Bottom line: There is no easy way to measure power consumption, and even dedicated hardware review sites have problems with it. Personally, I trust Anand far enough that I'm sure he didn't completely screw it up, and the numbers he has are probably close enough to the real thing. I'd forget about measuring power for myself.
xsilver - Friday, October 22, 2004 - link
Kinda late on the comments but..If anand or anybody can answer -- what is used to measure the "power consumption" software? or hardware? links? I would like to test this myselfthanks
Bakwetu - Friday, October 22, 2004 - link
Whoah, it's been a while since I checked out cpu reviews and I must say Amd has some impressive cpu:s nowadays. Even though I am budget oriented when it comes to buying hardare, I'd choose the 3400+ model before the 3200+, it's not all that much more expensive and seems to perform much bettert - Friday, October 22, 2004 - link
79uhuh.... and in a server type situation, how many raid arrays are ran off the chipset controllers? not many i would wager..
hell... u prolly have an independent fibre optic raid array :)
hardware, baby, hardware.
t.
knitecrow - Friday, October 22, 2004 - link
I always knew women were trouble when it comes to technology ;)screech - Thursday, October 21, 2004 - link
nice ones #79, 78. :)