The Test

In addition to our usual tests we've included PC World's WorldBench 5, an application based test suite much like Winstone and SYSMark that incorporates many popular applications. Unlike the aforementioned benchmarks, WorldBench does not test multitasking power, rather focusing on single application performance, making it very complementary to our existing benchmarks. The one thing to keep in mind about the WorldBench results is that the variation between test runs can be pretty significant; we do everything to make sure that the results are as consistent as possible (multiple runs, throwing out outliers, etc...) but the variation between runs in these tests can be as high as 6% - thus we would suggest looking at performance differences only greater than 10% in these tests for any sort of significance. The rest of the tests have variations between runs of 1 - 3%.

Our hardware configurations are similar what we've used in previous comparisons, with one addition - our Athlon 64 testbed now uses the recently released nForce4 chipset. For a review of that chipset read our own Wesley Fink's review of NVIDIA's latest chipset with SLI support.

AMD Athlon 64 Configuration

Socket-939 Athlon 64 CPUs
2 x 512MB OCZ PC3200 EL Dual Channel DIMMs 2-2-2-10
NVIDIA nForce4 Reference Motherboard
ATI Radeon X800 XT PCI Express

AMD Athlon XP Configuration

Athlon XP 3200+
2 x 512MB OCZ PC3200 EL Dual Channel DIMMs 2-2-2-10
ASUS A7N8X Deluxe nForce2 400 Motherboard
ATI Radeon X800 XT AGP

Intel Pentium 4 Configuration

LGA-775 Intel Pentium 4 and Extreme Edition CPUs
2 x 512MB Crucial DDR-II 533 Dual Channel DIMMs 3-3-3-12
Intel 925XE Motherboard
ATI Radeon X800 XT PCI Express

AMD Athlon 64 4000+ and Intel Pentium 4 570J: Head to Head Business/General Use Performance
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  • Dustswirl - Sunday, November 14, 2004 - link

    Aha! Thx guys!
  • michaelpatrick33 - Sunday, November 14, 2004 - link

    I meant #8 not #6 for the above post sorry
  • michaelpatrick33 - Sunday, November 14, 2004 - link

    #6 You are right probably since they didn't mention 754 and that would give more parameters for the test. Good catch. They simply downclocked the 130nm 939 3500+.
  • Glassmaster - Sunday, November 14, 2004 - link

    #6: I'm pretty sure they downclocked a 130nm 939 3500+ for those measurements.

    Glassmaster.
  • Dustswirl - Sunday, November 14, 2004 - link

    Quote:
    "[...]We also included power consumption figures from 130nm Socket-939 Athlon 64 3200+ and 3000+ chips, which as you may know, do not exist.[...]"

    Mea culpa...
  • Dustswirl - Sunday, November 14, 2004 - link

    Hmmmm so 2CH isn't like dual channel or? coz afaik 754 is single channel!
    Thx for the info :)
  • michaelpatrick33 - Sunday, November 14, 2004 - link

    #4. They are using the 754 130nm core 3000+. That is why they say 90nm beside the 3500+ and not any of the other AMD64's
  • Dustswirl - Sunday, November 14, 2004 - link

    I don't understand how the A64 3500 90nm consumes less power then the A64 3000 (512/2CH) that is supposed to be also a 90nm part...
  • michaelpatrick33 - Sunday, November 14, 2004 - link

    The power consumption at load is a tad high for the 3.8 at being nearly twice as high as the 3500+. 226 vs. 114. That trend is obviously why Intel killed the 4.0 and beyond and the Tejas I would imagine. I wonder how much the 600 series chips from Intel will be with the extremely expensive L2 cache vs the current 3.6 and 3.8 chips.
  • AtaStrumf - Sunday, November 14, 2004 - link

    I've probably said this before, but I really like those tables with % numbers. You might wonna switch everything over to it. It gives a much more precise picture of diffence than those graphs.

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