AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 & Athlon 64 4000+
Test Systems & SiSoft SANDRA 2004
How we configured our test systems: When configuring our test systems for this review, the first thing we did was enter the system BIOS and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High-Performance Default." The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows XP Professional (SP2) was installed. When the installation was complete, we hit the Windows Update site and downloaded all of the available updates. Then we installed all of the necessary drivers and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were also disabled, and we set up a 768MB permanent page file on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests...
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| SYSTEM 1: AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 (2.6GHz) AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 (2.4GHz) AMD Athlon 64 4000+ (2.4GHz) AMD Athlon 64 3800+ (2.4GHz) MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum NVIDIA nForce 3 Ultra Chipset 2x512MB Corsair PC3200 CL2 (2-2-2-5) NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT On-Board 10/100 Ethernet On-Board Audio WD "Raptor" 36GB Hard Drive 10,000 RPM SATA Windows XP Pro SP2 (Fully Patched) NVIDIA Forceware v66.81 DirectX 9.0c |
SYSTEM 2: Pentium 4 560 3.6GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4GHz ASUS P5AD2 i925X Chipset 2x512MB Corsair DDR2 533 CL4 NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT On-Board 10/100 Ethernet On-Board Audio WD "Raptor" 36GB Hard Drive 10,000 RPM SATA Windows XP Pro SP2 (Fully Patched) NVIDIA Forceware v66.81 DirectX 9.0c |
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We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2004, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. SANDRA consists of a set of information and diagnostic utilities that can provide a host of useful information about your hardware and operating system. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that comprise the SANDRA 2004 suite (CPU, Multimedia, Cache, and Memory). All of these tests were run with our Athlon 64 FX-55 and Athlon 64 4000+ processors set to their default clock speeds of 2.6GHz (13 x 200MHz) and 2.4GHz (12 x 200MHz).
;) Athlon 64 4000+ CPU Test @ 2.4GHz |
;) Athlon 64 4000+ M.M. Test @ 2.4GHz |
;) Athlon 64 4000+ Cache Test @ 2.4GHz |
;) Athlon 64 4000+ Memory Test @ 2.4GHz |
;) Athlon 64 FX-55 CPU Test @ 2.6GHz |
;) Athlon 64 FX-55 M.M. Test @ 2.6GHz |
;) Athlon 64 FX-55 Cache Test @ 2.6GHz |
;) Athlon 64 FX-55 Memory Test @ 2.6GHz |
When compared to the other high-end systems in SANDRA's database, our Athlon 64 FX-55 and Athlon 64 4000+ test systems outpaced the competition in the ALU portion of CPU Arithmetic benchmark, but the Pentium 4s dominated the FPU portion of the test, thanks to their inherent Hyper-Threading feature. Neither Athlon fared as well in the synthetic Multimedia test, but again, the Pentium 4's Hyper-Threading feature gives it a huge edge in this particular test. The Cache and Memory tests also show Intel's architecture with an advantage. The Memory bandwidth test, however, is where the Athlons really looked good. When used in conjunction with some fast low-latency RAM, the Athlon's on-die memory controller proves its usefulness. Both the Athlon 64 FX-55 and the Athlon 64 4000+ were able to break the 6GBps barrier, which is excellent for a system running at stock DDR400 speeds.
