Content Creation, General Usage and Memory Performance

Content Creation is a benchmark that has long been dominated by Intel's Pentium 4 processors. It was quite a surprise to see that the Athlon64 FX51 finally hold its own in the test, tying the 3.2 P4 for first place. Athlons have always done well in the Business Winstone bench, and the FX51 just extends the lead.

Science Mark 2 was recently updated, and we used the latest 9/23/03 build for our Memory testing. The real advantage of the on-CPU Memory Controller can clearly be seen in the increased memory bandwidth of the Dual-Channel 2.2GHz FX51 compared to the 3.2GHz Dual-Channel P4. Even more striking is the improvements in latency with the on-CPU controller. The Socket 939 should exhibit even lower memory latencies, since Registered memory does add some latency overhead to these memory scores.

Performance Test Configuration Media Encoding and Gaming Performance
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  • Anonymous User - Saturday, October 11, 2003 - link

    Hmm.. something just occured to me. (This is #24 again.) Anyone else remember the days of the Pentium and Pentium Pro? Well, it seems like we may be reentering the whole "high-end CPUs are different from midrange ones in ways other than clock speed" thing.. except this time around, the Macs aren't faster (the G5 and its super-deep pipeline can kiss my ass, thanks.. and probably the Hammer's while it's at it), and there are two companies in the game. This is going to be fun.
  • Anonymous User - Saturday, October 11, 2003 - link

    Hey, why isn't the Nehalem in this review? So what if it doesn't exist? They've got like 80% of it planned out now anyway, it's unfair to have this review biased towards AMD.

    Well, SOMEONE had to be ignorant and stupid, and hell if I'm going to say a thing about the Pentium 4 Xeon MP Edition.

    Uh. Anyway. The Athlon FX may just be a rebranded Opteron, but it's cheaper than the rebranded Xeon MP and much better at its job, so who cares what's a rebranded what? Not that I'd ever buy an Athlon 64 at these prices, but it seems the only market sector Intel has left is the low high end :D
  • Anonymous User - Friday, October 10, 2003 - link

    Excellent review! I'll be reading all of your writings from now on. :D
  • sandorski - Friday, October 10, 2003 - link

    Sweet motherboard, makes me think that as Athlon 64/FX motherboards mature, more performance will be acheived.
  • Anonymous User - Friday, October 10, 2003 - link

    Haha, good point #20!
  • Anonymous User - Friday, October 10, 2003 - link

    #12, perhaps because P4EE does not exist...
  • Anonymous User - Friday, October 10, 2003 - link

    When will this board be released?
  • Reflex - Friday, October 10, 2003 - link

    #11: I am not reffering to Quad-Channel DDR as I think you believe. I am reffering to Quad-Data Rate SDRAM. It uses the same pin count as DDR but sends information four times per clock, resulting in twice the bandwidth as DDR. If AMD supported it in their on board controller it would not require a higher pin count.

    However there must be some technical reason for QDR not appearing by now since its been 'just around the corner' for over two years now...
  • Anonymous User - Friday, October 10, 2003 - link

    Mostly I meant that running hand-compiled 64-bit apps would be irrelevant. I'd love to see another article in a few months, when Linux apps start actually arriving in 64-bit versions. But until then, it would be akin to Tom's OC'ing the P4EE. It may be interesting to a few people, but it would appear biased to almost everyone else.
  • Anonymous User - Friday, October 10, 2003 - link

    #15, 64-bit tests running linux would not be relevant? what about those of us who are running linux right now? I for one would love to see a 64-bit set of linux benchmarks included.

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