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LOSTCIRCUITS	SHORTCUTS: How many Hoover Dams? Isolating Power Dual Stress Liner Venice Improvements Test Conditions Power/Temperature Coefficient Idle vs. Burn-In 3D Rendering 3DMarks DOOM3 and Prime95 Overclocking & Conclusions Give Us Some Feedback on this Review
AMD Athlon64 "Venice" May Low Power be with you!
(Review by MS May 2, 2005)

3D Rendering Power

Depending on the model used, 3D-rendering stresses mostly the floating point units for the geometry and the ALUs for texturing applications. In other words, complex geometry will hammer on the FPUs whereas materials and lighting add ALU load. We have used Adam Trachtenberg's "Vase" model for a number of years because it causes 100% CPU load, and Caligari trueSpace as the rendering software is multithreaded to take full advantage of physical and logical processors. The latter point does not matter for the task at hand, we are only interested in the power consumption during a complete rendering of the vases using 2 x AntiAliasing to add a bit more complexity and extend the runtime to about 5 minutes - time enough to reach a temperature saturation.

As a sanity check, we overclocked the Venice core to 2780 MHz, equivalent to a 16% overclock which, should result into a power draw delta somewhere in the area of 25 - 30% (estimated) In practice, we found that the power consumption went even higher to a measured 31% delta. The relatively poor resolution of our measuring equipment may have skewed this number slightly but it is certainly not impossible.

Initial power consumption at the begin of the rendering task. for Grins, we added the Venice core overclocked to 2780 MHz, that is a 380 MHz or 16% overclock. The power consumption (without changing the core voltage) increases by over 30% according to our measurements.

Power consumption towards the end of the rendering process is slightly higher to reflect an increase in core temperature.

Runtime in Seconds: lower is better. The Venice core at 2400 MHz is slightly faster than the rest of the pack. The differences are small but were repeatable over consecutive runs. Overclocked to 2780 MHz, the Venice core takes an undisputed lead.

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