ABIT KV8-MAX3: Athlon64 and µGuru

Content Creation, General Usage and Memory Performance

Content Creation is a benchmark that has long been dominated by Intel's Pentium 4 processors. While the Abit KV8-Max3 did not quite perform at the level of the Athlon64 FX51, it is certainly competitive with P4 3.2GHz and compares well to other Athlon64 boards. Athlons normally outperform P4 on General Usage, but here, the Abit is an unusually strong performer, reaching FX51 performance levels.

Science Mark 2 was recently updated, and we used the latest 9/23/03 build for our Memory testing. The advantage of the on-CPU Memory Controller can clearly be seen in the very lowest latency levels for the Athlon64 compared to the FX51 and P4 3.2 processors. This very low latency is one of the reasons why the Athlon64 performs very well compared to Dual-Channel solutions. You can also see that while the FX51 has a very low latency compared to the P4, the latency overhead of Registered memory still increases latency compared to Athlon64 using regular unbuffered memory. Next year's Socket 939 should see a further drop in latency for the FX chip.