Gigabyte K8NNXP-940: Built on Athlon64 FX51 Strengths
by Wesley Fink on October 9, 2003 11:52 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
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.
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juc - Friday, October 10, 2003 - link
can you try and put in a lower clock opteron and see what type of overclocking you can do w/ it?, is the regular 14x opteron unlocked? it would be nice if it was.Reflex - Friday, October 10, 2003 - link
#1: A RDRAM version would completely eliminate the advantage of having an on-die memory controller on the CPU as it is very very high latency by design. The A64 thrives on very very low latency/high IPC, and RDRAM does not provide that.Honestly, what would be truly ideal is a QDR solution. But everytime I hear about it being close nothing seems to come of it. Too bad...
Anonymous User - Friday, October 10, 2003 - link
Considering the performance gain, money ain't that important :-)Anonymous User - Friday, October 10, 2003 - link
#1,Samsung PC-3200 512 MB DDR SDRAM $125
Samsung PC-3200 512 MB ECC Reg. DDR SDRAM $174
+49
Corsair XMS3200 PC-3200 512MB DDR SDRAM $175
Corsair XMS3200 PC-3200 ELL 512MB DDR SDRAM $220
Corsair XMS3200LL-RE PC-3200 ECC Reg. 512MB DDR SDRAM $235
+15 (+60 compared to slower timings)
completely unmeaningful to anyone with the money to buy an fx.
Anonymous User - Friday, October 10, 2003 - link
Looks like a cool mobo, and an amazingly fast CPU, but . . .Who's going to buy one of these!?!?!?
The price you'll spend on memory put's this way out of most people's price range! And before you yell at me for saying that, look up pricing for registered modules!
You could probably buy an awesome Athlon 64 system now, then upgrade your mobo and CPU to FX when the 939 pin version comes out, and still spend less money than paying this ridiculous premium on memory. Plus, it would be upgradable to future FX chips, not an unsupported beast. Anyone remember socket 423?
Say goodbye to the idea of 'surpassing the 4Gb memory limitation,' unless you have like $10,000 to spend on memory!
My real question here is why, when the Athlon 64 (non-FX) is such a success, would they make this strange beast?
What I would LOVE to see (I know you're going to hate this one) is a really tight RDRAM chipset ready when the 939-pin chipset comes out.
What do you think? Quad Channel 1200Mhz RDRAM on the new FX? Ain't gonna happen, but I can dream.