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LOSTCIRCUITS
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| AMD Athlon64-FX60 At the Turning Point | |
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(Review by MS January 10, 2006) |
| AMD Athlon64 X2-3800+ (Manchester) |
ViewPerf 8.1
Usually, we refrain from using ViewPerf for any CPU or even mainboard evaluation since it is extremely dependent on the graphics card and, even more, on the specific driver version used. In this case, we have a pair of nVidia Quadro FX 4500 graphics cards that we were using in both SLI and single card configuration. Nonetheless, for high end benchmarking, ViewPerf is flawed in that the versions of the benchmarking software used are hopelessly outdated. That is, for example, it is still 3dsmax 03 (compared to 3dsmax8 as the current version) which is single threaded and cannot take advantage of either multicore or even HyperThreading, the same limitations apply to all other applications within this suite.
SLI is still supported, at least on the driver level however, with graphics cards of the caliber of a Quadro FX4500, there is no incentive from using SLI since, because of the lack of thread parallelism, the CPU is the limitation. Instead of clubbing our readers with bona fide statements, we did run the necessary benchmarks to show exactly what we claim by comparing single vs. dual cores and HyperThreading enabled vs. disabled along with the exact same configurations in single GPU and SLI mode. In all cases, the driver version used was 77.37 which we found to yield the highest scores across the board (we tested about 10 different drivers between versions 77.37 and 83.10).
The first thing to note is that there is no performance benefit of SLI over non-SLI. The second thing is that there is a very minute increase in performance in dual core CPUs, however, monitoring the Windows task manager / performance tabs showed that only in some rare cases, the CPU usage went higher than 50% and never above 61% which was reached only in extremely short transients.
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Athlon64 X2-4200+ (dual core) |
next page: => OpenGL / Professional Graphics: ViewPerf 8.1 continued =>
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