AMD Athlon XP 2700+ And NVIDIA's nForce 2

The AMD Athlon XP 2700+ With The nForce 2
The Athlon Gets a BUS Speed Increase & A Killer New Chipset

By, Marco Chiappetta
October 1, 2002

XMPEG 4.5 is a Digital Video Stream conversion utility that takes a video of a certain file type, and converts it to another format. We took a 19MB MPEG 2 video clip from a classic TV series, that debuted in Davo's 533Mhz. BUS P4 review, and converted it to DIVX format using the DIVX Pro 5.02 Codec.

XMPEG Video Encoding Performance Gomer Pile Goes DivX

The Pentium 4 2.8 enjoyed its largest performance advantage in the video encoding test, outperforming the Athlon XP 2700+ by almost 12%.  The Athlon XP 2700+ / nForce 2 combo surged past the 2600+ / KT333 combo though, beating it out by 10.4%.  Throughout our battery of tests, we were impressed by the Athlon XP 2700+'s performance, but were equally as impressed with the nForce 2.  Even though we were using a pre-production CPU and motherboard, we're confident in saying the new Athlon's higher FSB in conjunction with the nForce 2's system level performance, make an extremely powerful team.

After testing the Athlon XP 2700+, and the nForce 2 powered Asus A7N8X, over the past few days, and seeing the kind of performance levels this hardware combination was able to attain, we couldn't help but be impressed.  AMD's transition to their .13 micron manufacturing process, may have been rough in the beginning, but they seem to have made great strides and are right back on track with very competitive products.  Also consider that the initial scores we saw from the nForce 2 were very nice, which bodes well for both NVIDIA and AMD.  We just hope their latest CPUs and motherboards based on the nForce 2, ship soon.

The pricing scale listed above is based on the most current information provided to us by AMD.  In their usual fashion, AMD has priced their flagship product significantly lower than Intel's top of the line CPU.  If these CPUs were available in volume today, the Athlon XP 2800+ would have a street price about $100 lower than a 2.8GHz Pentium 4, but they aren't going to be widely available for about a month.  We should see high-end systems with limited availability, from companies like Alienware and Falcon Northwest equipped with Athlon XP 2800+ and 2700+ CPUs in mid-to-late October, with retail CPUs arriving for the holiday season and into early 2003.  We wish we could say you'd be seeing these new products on shelves tomorrow, but unfortunately we can't.  The bottom line though is that the introduction of Athlons with a 333MHz FSB, and the NVIDIA nForce 2, make it that much easier to recommend the Athlon platform to anyone looking to build, or purchase, a high-end system.  Kudos to AMD...Now bring on "Barton" and drop the "Hammer"!

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