3800+ X2 REVIEW AMD ATHLON X2 64 3800+ BENCHMARK OVERCLOCKING TEST

3800+ X2 REVIEW AMD ATHLON X2 64 3800+ BENCHMARK OVERCLOCKING TEST
Posted:2006-05-06 By hardware review Number of View:11274
3800+ X2 REVIEW AMD ATHLON X2 64 3800+ BENCHMARK OVERCLOCKING TEST By :hardware review Posted:2006-05-06 xtreview is your : Video card - cpu - memory - Hard drive - power supply unit source 3800+ X2 Review AMD Athlon x2 64 3800+ benchmark Overclocking test Intel and AMD are both touting the advantages of dual core processors. Here at Neoseeker, so far we have taken a look at Intel's 820D and AMD's 4200 x2. Intel's and AMD's approaches are somewhat different - currently AMD has a technically superior design for cache coherency checking; Intel still has to perform all such functions across its FSB. Really, the Intel approach is nothing more than putting two cores on one die and marrying them at the FSB; whereas the AMD approach is more sophisticated as it uses a crossbar switch between the processor cores, the memory busses, and the Hypertransport links; not to mention an out of band communications link for cache coherency checks. Until recently, there was a huge price differential between Intel and AMD dual core processors - with the Intel 820 now hovering around $250 and the AMD 3800+ around $380 it was time we took another look at some dual core goodness. With AMD's 90nm process and better thermal characteristics, the 3800+ promises to be a good overclocker - and ofcourse we tried to overclock it to see how much extra bang for the buck you can get if you are adventerous. Testing the Athlon x2 64 3800+ Our test system consisted of the following hardware: DFI LanParty nF4 SLI-DRmotherboard 2*512 MB OCZ PC4800 Gold Edition VX RAM @ 3-4-4-8-2T OCZ ModStream 520Wpower supply Western Digital 1200JD SATA hard drive Leadtek Winfast 6600GT 128 MB PCIevideo card Software used during testing consisted of the following: Windows XP Service Pack2 NVIDIA ForceWare 66.93 drivers CineBench 2003 LAME MP3 Encoding PC Magazine Business Winstone 2004 PC Magazine Multimedia Content Creation 2004 POV-Ray 3.6 POV-Ray 3.7 beta4 RightMark Memory Analyzer SiSoft Sandra TMPGEnc MPEG2 Encoding WinRAR Call of Duty Comanche 4 Doom 3 The Athlon 3800+ x2 is AMD's answer to the lower cost Intel 820 D dual core processor. AMD is still pricing the 3800x2 at a significant premium over the 820D, assuming that the price differential will be justified by the performance differential - as well as the lower availability of dual core compatible motherboards for the 820D. Intel on the other hand is betting that people would rather pay less for an 820D processor than for a faster AMD 3800x2 processor; and it no doubt is still counting on name brand recognition, as some people will still only buy Intel. Looking at it from an outsiders point of view, once you consider the cost of 820D + 945 or 955 based motherboard + DDR2 memory vs. 3800x2 + almost any s939 based motherboard + DDR memory there is little if any price differential; so what it boils down to is which platform you prefer due to either performance or personal choice. Busines Winstone X2 3800+ benchmark While we are showing some single core results in the charts, we will be concentrating on comparing dual core performance. Here, the 3800x2 does quite well - at stock settings it beats the 820D by 4.2 Business Winstone points, or approximately 20%. The 4200x2 does of course beat the 3800x2 by 1.8 points... but look at the 3800x2 fly when overclocked. Running at 2.48GHz, it is 1.7 points ahead of the 4200x2 and 7.7 points ahead of the 820D. Content Creation X2 3800+ benchmark We have a similar situation in the Content Creation benchmark. The stock 3800x2 beats the 820D by 5.8 points; the 4200x2 beats the 3800x2 by 2.6 points... but the overclocked 2.48GHz 3800x2 beats the 820D by a full 11.7 points, and the 4200x2 by 3.3 points   Sandra CPU Test X2 3800+ benchmark There is no other way of saying it than the 3800x2 at stock speeds clobbers the 820D for the Sandra CPU tests. It's not even close. As we would expect, the 4200x2 beats the 3800x2, but look at the scores the overclocked 3800x2 gets! Sandra Memory Test X2 3800+ benchmark The Athlon 64's always had excellent memory performance, and this chart merely proves it yet again. The stock 3800x2 beats the 820D by almost 320MB/sec, and is in turn beaten by the 4200x2 by 450MB/sec - but look at the scores from the overclocked 3800x2! Yes, the single core overclocked 3800+ got the best results here, but we are comparing dual core chips for this review RightMark Read X2 3800+ benchmark We get the same story with Rightmark as we got with Sandra. The Athlon's simply dominate in memory performance - there is no visible advantage to using DDR2 vs. DDR here. RightMark Write X2 3800+ benchmark Encoding X2 3800+ benchmark Non-multi threaded encoding is dominated by clock speed, and the faster single core Intel and AMD chips clearly dominate the chart for Lame. Of the dual core devices, the 3800x2 is very narrowly beaten by the 820D, and both are beaten by the 4200x2 and especially the overclocked 3800x2. TMPGEnc is one of the few places where Hyperthreading shows a noticeable improvement for Intel processors versus single core processors; however dual core still wins. Unfortunately we had problems with our TMPGEnc encoder and are missing 3800x2 multi-threaded results at this time, however the 4200x2 results show a better than linear scaling for the 4200x2 - so given that the single threaded test shows the 3800x2 to be a bit faster than the 820D, it looks like the multi-threaded test would also have beat the 820D by a small margin. Compression X2 3800+ benchmark WinRAR likes a combination of raw processor speed and memory bandwidth, and is not multi-threaded at this time. The 3800x2 significantly outperforms the 820D and is in turn outperformed by the 4200x2. Cinebench X2 3800+ benchmark Cinebench is an excellent application for testing multi-core performance as it is CPU bound and scales well with the additional core. The stock 3800x2 handily beats the 820D, and surprisingly even beats the 4200x2 in the multithreaded test. The overclocked 3800x2 dominates the dual core results, however the lower than expected change in performance from the stock results suggests that with two cores running at 2.48GHz the system may have been starved for memory bandwidth. POVRay 3.7b4 X2 3800+ benchmark The multi-threaded versions of the test show the 820D beating both the 3800x2 and 4200x2, and in turn being beaten by the overclocked 3800x2. Call Of Duty X2 3800+ benchmark It should not be a surprise that for single threaded games the performance is limited by core design and speed, and that the Athlon performs better than the Pentiums. The 820D is thoroughly trounced here. Comanche 4 X2 3800+ benchmark Games are just not the 820D's forte. AMD again wins by quite some margins Doom 3 X2 3800+ benchmark Doom 3 has always done extremely well with Athlons; and here the 820 D is thoroughly beaten. I won't even give you percentages; just look at the chart of fps rates. X2 3800+ Overclocking The 3800x2 overclocked suprisingly well; I am quite certain that I would have been able to push it further with a better cooling solution - and I may try doing just that in a few weeks. For the best performance I was able to achieve, I ran the processor at 1.5V, the memory at 2.7V with 2.5-4-4-8-2T timings. I reduced the HT multiplier to 3x, and increased the FSB clock to 310MHz with a multiplier of 8. This resulted in a 2480MHz core clock speed, 930MHz HT speed, and 310MHz (DDR620) memory speed. The much higher memory bandwidth provided by these settings resulted in outstanding performance, with some of the highest results we've ever seen. We did have to use an outside fan to move additional air over the processor's OEM heatsink and fan to keep the system stable, however if I were building an x2 based system, I would probably use a high efficiency cooler like the Gigabyte G-Power as it would potentially allow for even greater overclocking headroom. If you wanted to overclock your system, here are some hints so you can do so as safely as possible: You should reduce the Hypertransport multiplier to 3x or 4x from the default 5x, as you should keep the Hypertransport frequency to 1.1GHz or less You will probably have to raise the CPU core voltage to 1.5V or even 1.55V You better have excellent cooling too; we had some temperature induced crashes at 2.48GHz with the standard cooler until we added extra cooling. Make sure you have good thermal compound applied in a thin even layer, and that the heatsink is making good contact with the processor Showing Dual Core Benefits There are real benefits to running two or more cores. Business users can already benefit from multiple cores - it will "smooth" out their multi-tasking experience, for all intents and purposes, two cpu hogging applications can run at once as smoothly as one could before. High speed DVD burning is just one example of something you could run in the background without fearing bad burns. Graphics rendering can also immediately show great benefit from multiple cores - and so can video encoding with the right software. But to be able to show you evidence of these benefits, we ran more than one application simultaneously to see whether the second core would help offload some of the work. We ran WinRAR in combination with LAME encoding for one test. At 12x200 (stock speed) WinRAR's performance did drop from 503 to 459, but the LAME encoding was actually a hair faster at 13:39 instead of 13:41 on the stand-alone test - so basically the two very CPU bound applications ran at full speed! At 8x310 (overclocked speed) WinRAR stayed at 544 - same as when running alone; and LAME also scored identically to running alone! I believe the slightly lower score at the stock speed was due to contention for memory, but the overclocked memory bus made sufficient bandwidth available for both programs to run at full speed. We also ran WinRAR with Doom3 for a second series of tests. WinRAR + Doom3 did show a slight slowdown - at stock speeds the frame rate dropped to 106.9 from 118.3, and at overclocked speeds it dropped to 133.9 from 142.7 - but still, this is very little impact for running two very CPU bound applications at once! Conclusion The 3800x2 ROCKS. The gaming performance shows that even when only using one of the cores you can still get very high framerates in popular games; and once multi-threaded games come out - which may take years due to the need to completely re-write the engines to take full advantage of multiple cores - gaming performance will get even better. The Cinebench and POVRay 3.7b4 results show that multi-threaded applications can benefit greatly from the second core; for applications that are not memory bound (ie they don't spend most of their time reading/writing from memory) you can actually closely approach the theoretical maximum of twice the performance of a single core. Business users who run several applications at once will immediately benefit from a smoother running system, one that will not drop to its knees under a heavy load - no more worrying about your DVD burning being affected by foreground applications. Given the current directions of the computer and console industries, you can bet that in the future all major software houses will be re-writing their applications and game engines to fully exploit multiple cores by writing heavily multi-threaded code; and when that happens, just watch the performance fly on multi-core systems. Highly Recommended. 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