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Five AMD Athlon 64 Models – Which One to Choose?

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Conclusion

We have reviewed how the speed in various applications depends on frequency, L2 cache capacity, and memory controller by the example of AMD K8 series processors. Of course, the results may be different for other models, however if the code is the same (that is if it's not optimized, for example, for Pentium 4), then the comparison results between Celeron and Pentium 4 and i865/i848 chipsets will be the same.

As a conclusion we'll sum up all the results obtained into one table. The cells contain performance gain percentage. It contains figures greater than 3 in their absolute value.

  Frequency
(3700+ versus 3400+(2.2/1M))
L2 Cache
(3700+ versus 3400+)
Dual channel controller
(3800+ versus 3400+)
(Non)registered memory
(FX-53 (939) versus FX-53)
RMMA 3.1 memory read
98,1
RMMA 3.1 memory write
98,2
RMMA 3.1 d-cache latency, minimal
15,9
RMMA 3.1 d-cache latency, maximal
13,6
3DStudioMAX
9,8
Lightwave 7.5
9,1
Lame
9,2
Divx
8,9
Wmv9
8,9
canopus
7,3
4,5
mainconcept
9,2
7zip
9,4
5,0
9,6
Rar
6,0
6,0
RtCW
5,4
3,6
7,1
3,5
Serious Sam : TSE
5,3
5,1
6,6
3,1
UT2003
7,0
5,3
4,9

As we have already written before, performance is mostly affected by frequency. And the dependence on this parameter is almost linear in many tested applications. Dual channel memory is important for some tasks, for example 7zip and all the three games. L2 cache capacity has a considerable effect on performance in Canopus ProCoder, archivers, and games. Registered memory modules used in Socket 940 processors have little effect on performance. Only two games demonstrated higher results (by 3.1–3.5%) with the 939 processor.

Of course, we have often witnessed professional applications 3dsmax and Lightwave to depend solely on the core frequency, but still, the fact that one can use not the most expensive processor to work in these applications is always pleasing :)

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Kirill Kochetkov (kochet@ixbt.com)
Dmitry Majorov (destrax@ixbt.com)

December 9, 2004


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