FSB Scaling - The Athlon XP

The Athlon XP 3200+ is based on AMD's 0.13-micron Barton core (see our review for a full description of the Barton core) and runs at a clock speed of 2.20GHz. The first thing to keep in mind that at 2.20GHz the Athlon XP 3200+ still carries a lower clock speed than the short lived Thoroughbred-B based Athlon XP 2800+ (2.25GHz). Although the 3200+ only holds a 34MHz clock speed advantage over the 3000+, AMD has moved to a 200MHz DDR FSB for the chip (effectively 400MHz).

Alongside the chip, NVIDIA has revealed that they've been certifying the nForce2 chipsets for use with the faster FSB for quite some time and thus re-badged them as nForce2 Ultra 400 in order to indicate support for the FSB.

So how much of a boost do we see from increasing the FSB on the Barton core to 400MHz? First be sure to read our explanation of why a faster FSB results in better performance here, then take a look at the following tests:

The 400MHz FSB provides a 0 - 7% improvement in performance for the Athlon XP at 2.20GHz, with the average being a 3.2% increase. While we'd normally say that the benefits of a higher FSB frequency will best be realized as the processor reaches higher clock speeds, but with AMD keen on replacing the Athlon XP with the Athlon 64, we'd say the move to a 400MHz FSB wasn't absolutely necessary.

Index FSB Scaling - The Pentium 4
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  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 8, 2003 - link

    Atari 2600 Rules!
  • Anonymous User - Sunday, September 7, 2003 - link

    i love how you see amd chips compared directly to intel ones which cost 8 times as much - and then they say that the intel 'kicked arse' - also optimised code compared to unoptimised (ala sandra)

    i think ill write a review 'dual AMD 3200+ = intel killer - kicks the p3-1000 arse' just wait till you see how extended 3dnow+ is going whomp intels mmx1 hehehe
  • Jeff7181 - Saturday, August 30, 2003 - link

    #11... the review on the 3.0C used PC800 RDRAM's and this one uses DDR400. That's one difference... they may have also used slightly different options for testing since they seem to customize the benchmark.
  • Anonymous User - Saturday, August 23, 2003 - link

    Read Tomsharware review and xbitlabs and youll see how the p4 flies above those athlons
  • Anonymous User - Saturday, August 23, 2003 - link

    I think INTEL and their last line of Pentium 4 really kick AMD athlon ass ... and very hard ...
  • Anonymous User - Friday, August 8, 2003 - link

    Hello,
    I was wondering if any of you guys knows how to overclock the P4 2.8GHz on a I875PBZ MOBO
    Why the bios under the same board are so limited?
    Can the Intel MOBO 875PBZ upgrade my CPU?
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, August 5, 2003 - link

    Why is there such a large difference in the UT2003 benchmark results between this review and that of the P4 3.0C? Hmm...
  • Anonymous User - Saturday, August 2, 2003 - link

    Pictures does not work on XP using IE either.
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, July 22, 2003 - link

    Another web site did testing on the same two chips and the p4 came out on top.If you want to see it go to tomshardware and read for yourselves.
  • Anonymous User - Sunday, July 20, 2003 - link

    What really buggers me off is that I can't see any of the attached images in this article as I am using Opera 7.11 on a linux box. Please make your site all OS- and browser-compatible. (At least to some extent anyway). Not everyone uses IE and Windows.

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