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LOSTCIRCUITS	SHORTCUTS: A new Platform Quad-FX Idiosyncrasies The Motherboard Test Config, Benchmark Overview Memory Performance The 64-bit Question Idle Power by OS Max Power Render Power (Cinebench) trueSpace POV-Ray Media Encoding 3DMark'06 F.E.A.R., DOOM3 FarCry 1.4 COD2, Prey Final Words Give Us Some Feedback on this Review
AMD's Quad FX Platform What's in a 4x4?
(Author: MS, January 21, 2007)

Test Configuration

** AMD uses the same model numbers for different revisions. To allow a better distinction between the processors shown, we use the * to flag the 65 nm G-stepping. In addition, we are labeling the 65 nm CPU running at 2.4 GHz with a memory frequency of 800 MHz as 4600* for a direct apples to apples comparison to the 4600+

*** For most benchmarks we used the system as supplied by AMD, that is, with the XFX GeForce 7900 GTX graphics cards in SLI configuration. For gaming benchmarks, we switched to the ASUS n7800 GT cards for the sake of comparabilty with our data base. In addition, we ran all gaming benchmarks again with the 7900 GTX cards to check for any impact on performance, which was non-existent at the resolutions used with the sole exception of Prey - which in the case of the 85.96 drivers does not recognize the application as SLI capable. Renaming the executable to "Qake4" enabled SLI also in Prey with the older drivers, however, due to time constraints, we did not re-run the benchmarks on all systems - therefore, we only show the results using non-SLI configured benchmark runs.

Benchmark Overview

We used the followig benchmarks: SiSoft Sandra 2007 Cachemem 2.65 ScienceMark 2.0 CPU-Z Caligari TrueSpace 5.1 POVRay Cinebench 2003 3DMark2006 Call of Duty2 DOOM3 FarCry F.E.A.R. MainConcept H.264 Dr. DivX OSS DVD-Shrink 3.2

Power Measurements

Looking at system power consumption is interesting to a certain degree, however, for all practical purposes we are more interested in the isolated CPU power consumption. To estimate the latter, we used the same power measurement setup as in previous reports. Briefly, we used a Fluke 80i-410 AC/DC current probe in combination with a Wavetek Meterman 30XR multimeter to measure current through the isolated +12V supply lines feeding into the CPU VRM. To increase granularity of the measurements, we ran the supply lines in a triple loop through the clamp. The clamp itself was calibrated using a BK Precision model 1692, 30V 40 A DC power supply. Since there is a temperature dependency of the probe, we monitored the zero-current offset at the beginning of each measurement as well as at the end of each run. If the values drifted we retook the measurements. Despite these precautions there are possible deviations of the read-out from the real current, however, these errors mostly affect the lower (processor idle) measurements. We estimate that the errors should not be more than 10% at the lower end of the data and less than 5% in the mid and higher data range. Moreover, since the same procedures were applied to all processors tested, there may be an offset in the absolute numbers, however, the relation of the individual cores to each other with respect to power consumption should be fairly accurate. The extremely high power consumption of the CPU at full load causes a voltage droop by approximately 500 mV on the 12V output, the calculations are corrected accordingly.

In addition to the method outlined above, we used a modified PSU to run the 12V line directly through the Wavetek Meterman and read out the current. Both methods gave identical results.

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