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Closer Look at AMD Memory Performance

Now that we've shown AMD's Athlon 64 to be the CPU of choice for Half Life 2, let's have a closer look at the factors that influence Athlon 64 performance in Half Life 2.

Single Channel DDR400 vs. Dual Channel DDR400

The older Socket-754 Athlon 64s and the newer Socket-754 Sempron processors both only offer a 64-bit DDR400 memory interface, but how important is memory bandwidth to Half Life 2 performance? 

In the past we've seen that the Athlon 64 platform is not very sensitive to memory bandwidth, but that will obviously vary from one application to the next.  Let's see how Half Life 2 fares:

Surprisingly enough, Half Life 2 is decently sensitive to memory bandwidth.  While GPU limited benchmarks like at_canals_08 show a mere 3% performance improvement, at_coast_05 and at_c17_12 in particular show a 7% and 12% performance improvement, respectively.

Dual Channel DDR400 vs. Dual Channel DDR333

Given what we've seen with 64-bit vs. 128-bit memory buses and Half Life 2, we'd expect DDR333 to have a reasonably large impact on performance, so let's find out:

The largest differential between DDR400 and DDR333 is about 7%, and obviously if we were talking about a single channel memory setup the difference would be even greater.  Point?  More memory bandwidth is better for Half Life 2, that will mean even higher frame rates for overclockers.