Affordable Dual Core from AMD: Athlon 64 X2 3800+
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 1, 2005 9:36 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
The Test
Our hardware configurations are similar to what we've used in previous comparisons. For this test, we focused on CPUs at or around the Athlon 64 X2 3800+'s $354 price point.AMD Athlon 64 Configuration
Socket-939 Athlon 64 CPUs
2 x 512MB OCZ PC3200 EL Dual Channel DIMMs 2-2-2-7
ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe
ATI Radeon X850 XT PCI Express
Intel Pentium 4 Configuration
LGA-775 Intel Pentium 4 and Pentium D CPUs
2 x 512MB Crucial DDR-II 533 Dual Channel DIMMs 3-3-3-12
Intel 925XE Motherboard
ATI Radeon X850 XT PCI Express
Business/General Use Performance
Business Winstone 2004
Business Winstone 2004 tests the following applications in various usage scenarios:. Microsoft Access 2002
. Microsoft Excel 2002
. Microsoft FrontPage 2002
. Microsoft Outlook 2002
. Microsoft PowerPoint 2002
. Microsoft Project 2002
. Microsoft Word 2002
. Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition 2003
. WinZip 8.1
Office Productivity SYSMark 2004
SYSMark's Office Productivity suite consists of three tests, the first of which is the Communication test. The Communication test consists of the following:"The user receives an email in Outlook 2002 that contains a collection of documents in a zip file. The user reviews his email and updates his calendar while VirusScan 7.0 scans the system. The corporate web site is viewed in Internet Explorer 6.0. Finally, Internet Explorer is used to look at samples of the web pages and documents created during the scenario."
"The user edits the document using Word 2002. He transcribes an audio file into a document using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 6. Once the document has all the necessary pieces in place, the user changes it into a portable format for easy and secure distribution using Acrobat 5.0.5. The user creates a marketing presentation in PowerPoint 2002 and adds elements to a slide show template."
"The user opens a database using Access 2002 and runs some queries. A collection of documents are archived using WinZip 8.1. The queries' results are imported into a spreadsheet using Excel 2002 and are used to generate graphical charts."
Microsoft Office XP SP-2
Here, we see in that the purest of office application tests, performance doesn't vary all too much. 
Mozilla 1.4
Quite possibly the most frequently used application on any desktop is the one that we pay the least amount of attention to when it comes to performance. While a bit older than the core that is now used in Firefox, performance in Mozilla is worth looking at as many users are switching from IE to a much more capable browser on the PC - Firefox. 
ACD Systems ACDSee PowerPack 5.0
ACDSee is a popular image editing tool that is great for basic image editing options such as batch resizing, rotating, cropping and other such features that are too elementary to justify purchasing something as powerful as Photoshop. There are no extremely complex filters here, just pure batch image processing. 
Winzip
Archiving performance ends up being fairly CPU bound as well as I/O limited. 
WinRAR 3.40
Pulling the hard disk out of the equation, we can get a much better idea of which processors are truly best suited for file compression. 
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masher - Wednesday, August 3, 2005 - link
> " believe he meant to post this review showing the X2 3800 matching or besting the XE840 in all but a handful of tests:"Let's see...the 840 wins 3DMark, half the Cinebench, Lame Encoding, DivX encoding, MPA encoding, SiSoft FP, Sisoft Multimedia, and Sphinx.
The 3800 wins the 3D shooters, PoVRay, ScienceMark, picColor, and half the Cinebench.
The Intel results are "all but a handful"?
PrinceGaz - Monday, August 1, 2005 - link
I was surprised that no attempt was made (or posted in the review) to overclock the X2 3800+, given that most people reading it here would want to know what headroom it had.Fortunately most other good sites did overclock it and post their results, and the general consensus is 2.4-2.5GHz was as much as they could do with air-cooling at reasonable voltages. Looks like the X2 3800+ really is all the speed-binned rejects, at least from the samples AMD sent out to review sites.
Houdani - Monday, August 1, 2005 - link
Well, Anand did to a tiny bit of overclocking, he just didn't do any benches with the overclock. The above snip was taken from the final page of the article.
[L]http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...[/L]
PrinceGaz - Monday, August 1, 2005 - link
Apologies to Anand, I was skimming through the article rather than reading it in full, and missed that. Seems like 2.4-2.5GHz is all the current batch of X2 3800+ can do, which is less than impressive. Ordered a X2 4400+ today as a result.Hacp - Monday, August 1, 2005 - link
They had a DDR2 533 1gb kit for 80 bucks at monarch I think. But I think the DDR2 667FSB chips are more expensive...Joepublic2 - Monday, August 1, 2005 - link
"Except that by the time you get a new motherboard that supports that cheaper Intel chip and the pricier DDR2 memory, any price advantage Intel had is already gone. And the AMD system still outperforms the Intel one 15% in for the 830D and 20% in the 820D. So choose wisely...""From what I can see, Intel 955 chipset motherboards are around $180 - $220, which is a lot more expensive than a decent Socket 939 motherboard. SO overall thge system cost is much cheaper than the Intel 830, and very close to the 820."
You guys obviously haven't checked prices lately. At newegg, you can get a nice ASUS 945 board for $130, which while being more expensive than an EPOX 939 at $85, is much lower than "$180-220". Also, 2GB of DDR is $177.98, and 2GB of DDR2 is $186.00. But I agree, it's worth the extra $50 over the Pentium D 820 platform.
krisia - Monday, August 1, 2005 - link
Hmmm, zipzoomfly has a 945 mobo for $110 and 1GB DDR2 ram for $92.Looks reasonable to me...
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?Pr...">http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?Pr...
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Hacp - Monday, August 1, 2005 - link
IMO Anand's article was the fairest. He compared the Intel 830 to the AMD 3800. Some sites compared the 820 to the 3800+ and it obviously was not fair to Intel to do that.Also, if you want an entry level processor and want multitasking, you should go with an HT enabled Intel. At 240 dollars, you should be able to buy a 3.2 GHZ Intel processor with HT enabled, which will perform WAY better at single threaded tasks and perform well in some multithreaded applications. Thats what ENTRY is. You sacrafice future performance for performance right now.
Finally, Anand, I would have liked to see the 3800+ compared to the 3.2 GHZ Intel Dual core processors. Why? Because AMD's PR numbers for single threaded applications indicate that the 3800+(2.0 GHZ with 512 Cache AKA the 3200+) should be comparable with the 3.2 GHZ processor. You shouldn't soely compare the processors on price, but also the PR system :). A 3.0 and 3.2 Intel Dual core comparision with the 3800+ X2 would have been a nice......
cryptonomicon - Monday, August 1, 2005 - link
that chip looks awesome! how come they don't have that benchmark called um,Comparison over number of Threads
or something, where they run some sort of bench over 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, threads. I always thought that was an interesting one to see how effective each processor handled multiple threads.
Samus - Monday, August 1, 2005 - link
There is no reason at this point to go with an Intel based system for general productivity (business, graphics, compression, a/v editing, 3D modeling, CAD) AND gaming (where AMD had always excelled)I couldn't agree with Anand more. Where you loose single threaded/task performance (from clockspeed) you more than make up for it in multi threaded/task performance. The overclocking potential is also fairly good, 2.46GHz is nothing to sneeze at when your talking about a 2.0GHz budget chip for 350 bucks.
Also, comparing 512KB dual cores to 1MB dual core's at the same clock speed, there is little performance difference because since the cores communicate directly via L2, not via HT (or bus like Intel) your theoretical performance-based L2 is 1MB and 2MB respectively. AMD's memory controller is so efficient to begin with that the difference between 1MB and 2MB L2 cache is very little.
The cache's are also independent (like they always have been, ie L1 and L2 being non-consecutive) so they don't hold the same information.
Boy, they've come a long way.