AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Dual-Core

How we configured our test systems: When configuring the test systems for this review, we first entered their system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults."  The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows XP Professional (SP2) was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed the rest of the necessary drivers and removed Windows Messenger from the system.  Auto-Updating and System Restore were 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.

Test System Specifications "Intel & AMD Inside!"

Preliminary Benchmarks with SiSoft SANDRA 2005 Synthetic Testing

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, 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 partially comprise the SANDRA 2005 suite (CPU, Multimedia, Cache, and Memory) with the Athlon 64 X2 4800+ installed into our test rig.  All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor and memory running at their respective default clock speeds of 2.4GHz and 200MHz (DDR400).

CPU Arithmetic Benchmark A64 X2 4800+ (2.4GHz)

Multimedia Benchmark A64 X2 4800+ (2.4GHz)

CPU Cache Benchmark A64 X2 4800+ (2.4GHz)

Memory Benchmark A64 X2 4800+ (2.4GHz)

Sandra's CPU Arithmetic and Multimedia benchmarks show the potential performance benefits of the Athon 64 X2 4800+. With relatively simple synthetic tests like these, that essentially fit entirely in the processor's L2 cache and rely strictly on their computational abilities, we see performance increases of nearly 100% over similarly clocked single-core processors.

The CPU Cache and Memory bandwidth tests, however, are affected by the limitations of the shared architecture mentioned on the previous page. The Athlon 64 X2 4800+'s cache performance was roughly half that of its single core counterparts with every block size tested. And the memory bandwidth benchmark reported peak bandwidth numbers about 200MB/s - 500MB/s lower than we've seen with similarly equipped single-core Athlon 64 4000+ powered systems.