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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skiboysteve - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
On the Business winstone 2004..."The Pentium 4 550 and Athlon 64 3800+ tie in the middle, while the 3400+ offers statistically similar performance."
No they didnt.
microAmp - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Very nice article, loved the L2 cache and memory comparisons at the end.thermalpaste - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Way back in 2000, I felt that Intel was doing something stupid by introducing the Willamette.The thunderbird was faster than the p-III coppermine at the same clock speeds, but considering that the p-III just had 2 parallel FPUs compared to the 3 on the athlon. An additional FPU would have helped of course. though the P-III core was not able to sustain higher clock speeds , intel could have redesigned a marginally deeper pipeline on the same core rather than designing the pentium-4 with a mammoth 20 stage pipeline.
Now the prescotts come with a 30-odd stage pipeline, but the integer unit runs at twice the speed which doesn't make the 7th generation of processors from intel very 'scalable'. Besides the processor heats upto 70 odd degrees with consummate ease (Im staying in India where the avg. room temperature is something like 29 degrees Celsius) and is not overclocker friendly.
I am waiting for the newer chips from Intel, based on the Pentium-M a.k.a the P6 architecture.
AMD is way ahead of Intel as of now.
skiboysteve - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Athlon 64 4000+ - 2.4GHz - 1MB - 128-bitAthlon 64 3800+ - 2.4GHz - 512KB - 128-bit
Athlon 64 3400+ - 2.4GHz - 1MB - 64-bit
Athlon 64 3400+ - 2.4GHz - 512KB - 64-bit
Athlon 64 FX-53 - 2.4GHz - 1MB - 128-bit
these numbers look off.
Your saying there are two s754 3400+, and one has more cache?
eva2000 - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
why leave out the 3700+ s754 1MB from suhc a nice comparison :)miketheidiot - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
excellent article. I agree with #2 that I would have liked to see an overclocking comparison, or at least a quick demonstation of the 4000 and fx-55. Still a great article though.GhandiInstinct - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
We can always marvel at them but the prices, realistcaly speaking is a waste of our time. I'm as interested in the FX-55 as much as the IBM super-computer blue.Zac42 - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
I especially liked the comparrison of the equally priced value procs at the end of the article. Nice way to sum up the graphs. Good overall comparison, as you guys have just about any possible app one could use on a PC. Now we just need an OC comparrison, and we will be set!DrMrLordX - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Nice article so far, still reading it, but I would like to know where the 925XE chipset-based P4 board was in this review? Are those available to you guys yet? Just wondering.