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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RaistlinZ - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
I may have missed it, but does anyone know if the Athlon 64 4000+ will be multiplier unlocked like the FX-53 is? That's the only thing I see that would differentiate the two chips.RaistlinZ - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Illissius - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Re: the necessity of Prescott. You are missing one very important consideration: Prescott has iAMD64 support. (Although it is currently disabled, no doubt because Intel has intentions of selling you the same processor twice). A simple die shrink of Northwood would not.I half suspect one of the reasons for Prescott's problems could be that AMD's 64-bit extensions don't mesh very well with a Netburst architecure, but they had to shoehorn it in anyways, and had to make a lot of unappealing design decisions in the process. (I've never designed a processor, though, so this is just baseless speculation.) I'd be interested in seeing 64-bit enabled chips on a Pentium M architecture...
CrystalBay - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Moores law is dead...:(Runamile - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Awsome read. Great Job. And HOLY COW does Intel get their a$$ handed to them!I would of liked to see some price/performance curves too. That would of summed it up quite nicely.
hertz9753 - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Athlon 64 3700+ 2.4GHz 1MB 64-bitAthlon 64 3400+ 2.4GHz 512KB 64-bit
Athlon 64 3400+ 2.2GHz 1MB 64-bit
araczynski - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
nice, but luckily i still see no reason to upgrade my 2.4@3.3, at least not for a few measly benchmark FPS.hertz9753 - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
AlphaFox - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Id like to see some kind of comparison with an OC XP Mobile. I have one runing at 2.46ghz and not really sure how it stacks up here...PrinceGaz - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
An excellent article, well done.About the only thing missing was a bit of overclocking of the FX-55 to see if the introduction of strained silicon considerably increased the headroom. Obviously it has allowed them to ship parts rated at 2.6GHz which they weren't previously able to do, but how much better is the FX-55 compared to a CG-stepping FX-53? Does the use of strained silicon mean the FX-55 is a new stepping?