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LOSTCIRCUITS	SHORTCUTS: Top Page Test Configurations Winstones Sysmark2004 Cinebench2003 3ds max 5.1 3DMark2001SE Aquamark3 Comanche4 FinalFantasy Gunmetal =>X2 Conclusions Athlon64 3400+ Pricing Give Us Some Feedback to Help Us Improve our Reviews
AMD Athlon64 3400+ The speed bump that was more
(Review by MS, January 6, 2004)

Originally, this was meant as a sweet, short report of a simple speed bump in the life cycle of a processor family. And then there was Sysmark2004 and another bunch of benchmarks that all had their quibbles and all of a sudden, there was another week of benchmarking down the tubes. We should have confined ourselves to running a few SiSoft Sandra CPU benchmarks and maybe PCMark2004.

But then, there is the challenge and the challenge in this case was actually just to survive some of the benchmarks shown here. Sysmark2004 is a monster with about 12 GB of data that need to be digested. Merely copying the data for the setup of the benchmark is enough to cause the HDD cache to glow in the dark and we all know what that does to performance and stability.

One thing that might have transpired in this review is the fact that it is not just the CPU that matters, it is the graphics card, it is the HDD and it is the core system logic. The problem, however, is that whatever works for one application may not work for the other and in order to paint an isolated picture of the CPU performance, it would be necessary to run it on all different platforms.

What it all comes down to is that there is no more clear winner. Admittedly, there are applications that favor the one or the other architecture but it appears pretty much a tie between the P4 and the Athlon64. There is, however, the restriction that we were actually running the Athlon64 on one leg, it is meant to run on a 64-bit OS in order to take advantage of all the internal registers and to truly unfold its power. We are currently running a pre-release of Longhorn64, just for grins, but it has given us an idea of where the PC world is heading and how much processing power will be needed. The Athlon64 is ready for that.

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