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AMD Athlon64 4000+
(Review by MS and Jerry Coffin, October 19, 2004)

Benchmarking Issues

The Athlon64 4000+ was shipped together with the MSI K8T Neo2 and to our initial chagrin, A64 4000+ was, in fact, quite a bit slower than the A64-3800+ we reviewed earlier. The main issue was the choice of the mainboard, as it turned out later, the ASUS A8V we had used in our review of the Athlon64 3800+ was substantially faster across the board than the K8T Neo 2. As the saying goes though, there is no free lunch and one of the drawbacks was that the ASUS board did not like at all the Corsair memory supplied with the MSI board. In fact, the A8V does not seem to appreciate any DIMMs with more of 256 MB total density. To make a long story short, we ended up with four 256 MB OCZ PC3700 EB modules that gave the overall best performance on the system at hand.

One additional issue surfaced with switching between the A64-3800 and the A64-4000, even after upgrading to the latest 007 BIOS revision, the 4000+ did not run stable. That is, all benchmarks shown were run on the 3800+ (007 BIOS) but the 4000+ kept crashing. The solution was to reset the CMOS and to load the BIOS default settings, after which the board was running rock solid. The same issue surfaced when switching back to the 3800+. To keep things somewhat comparable, the same BIOS version was used for all benchmarks, however, keep in mind that some of the hidden performance settings might have changed from one CPU to the other, which may account for some of the issues we found during our testing procedures. One thing to keep in mind here is that the A8V used is a preproduction board and the issues mentioned do not surface in production versions.

More Benchmarking Issues

The different graphics interfaces, that is, we are looking at AGP8X on the AMD platforms, as well as on the Intel i875 testbed, whereas the i925 features a PCIe interface add another variable in that it is not possible to use the physically identical graphics adapter in all test beds. Given the hardware at hand, we ended up using a Sapphire RADEON X800XT Platinum PCIe for the Intel 925 platform whereas in all other cases an ASUS AX800Pro modded for XT functionality was used. Despite the fact that nominally, this card is less powerful than the XT, our initial tests suggested no difference in performance. In addition, most of the benchmarks we ran were done at settings likely to stress the CPU rather than the GPU. However, the results with 3DMark05 are somewhat suspicious, even though our Athlon64 results match what we have seen in reviews elsewhere.

Cooling and Power Issues

Bottom-line: Cool is the Rule

When we looked at the Athlon64-FX53 we found that the processor's ability to overclock was greatly dependent on the cooling solution. That is, even the Zalman CNPS7000 AlCu was only capable of pushing the FX53 to a moderate 2600 MHz, whereas the all-copper version of the same design had no problem keeping the CPU running at 2700 MHz. The Athlon64 4000+ FX55 processors appear to require a more than the standard coolers delivered with the lower speed grades, a heatpipe design is on duty with the top-end processors.

Along the same lines is the power demand of the new processors, for stock operation, any upper-class power supply may suffice but the latest generation of Athlon64 processor is also the first where overclocking success stands in direct correlation to the quality and power of the PSU used. To make sure we were not limited in that department, we used mother's finest, that is, the OCZ Powerstream 520, which catapulted the Athlon64 4000+ all the way up to 2800 MHz with 150 mV overvoltage on the CPU power.

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