Author: Aaron Gordon
Date: 04:05:16 05/07/02
Go up one level in this thread
I suppose people just don't read my posts, if so, it's just not sinking in. This will be the third or fourth time I've said this. Those benchmarks and crap you see.. the Athlon is NOT OPTIMIZED. Look at it again. Let it soak in. Yes, lets go ahead and reread that one more time. THE ATHLON IS NOT OPTIMIZED IN THOSE TESTS. My memory is about the same bandwidth at 150/300DDR as a P4 but with much lower latency. Without the bios settings it is *2* times slower. Here's a screenshot for you. Mine is the topmost result. ftp://speedycpu.dyndns.org/pub/overclockstuff/pics/athlonxp/sisoftmem.jpg This as far as tweaking goes is considered slow & still matches & due to being much faster latency wise, beats the P4. If you read up a bit you can buy a motherboard that can run 166(333DDR) or 200(400DDR)fsb with stock PCI/AGP speeds which means you really aren't overclocking anything (KT266a/333 can do this with absolutely NO problems). Just pick up the proper ram (PC2700/3000/3200) & punch it up to 166 or 200fsb and you're good to go. You'd score around 2,800 in that particular test if not a little more. In Quake3 the FPS is massively increased with those options enabled in the bios (Q3 is bandwidth hungry). Stock speeds my AthlonXP 1900+ (1.6GHz) beats a P4-2.2GHz in Quake3 by a large margin. At 1.8GHz/150(300DDR) a 2.6 gets blown to pieces. If I use my AMD optimized DLL's the FPS is increased another 10-20%. Of course if you have all the bios options disabled it'll be a bit slower (if you use the DLL's it'll still be faster though, even with a ~500mhz disadvantage to a P4). You can test this for yourself. Make sure you get a quality board (only $80-100) and enable 4 way interleaving, 4/8k page blocks, set the CL latency to 2T instead of 3T (there will be another option for 5/6T, put it to 5T). There will be other options. They vary from board to board.. such as fast cpu command decode, cpu drive strength, USCW or WC AGP options, 4x agp enabled, 128 or more AGP aperture size, etc. I'm looking forward to the tests, Slate. Also Slate, you must have done something wrong with your 1.73GHz AthlonXP testing because it should mame that P4 in crafty. Take a look at some benchmarks of various Tbird/AthlonXP speeds vs different speed P4's. The AthlonXP's use AthlonXP binaries, P4 used P4, etc. http://speedycpu.dyndns.org/crafty/craftybench.jpg Even a dinky Tbird 1GHz @ 1.68 beats a P4 Northwood at almost 2.5GHz not to mention that P4 was running 137fsb(548MHz QDR). I'm not sure how you tested that AthlonXP.. but having 12 divx movies playing while benchmarking is generally a BAD thing. ;)
This page took 0.01 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.