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Some miracles happened at AMD, the Athlon XP finally moves on to a 333 MHz FSB. Combine the higher external CPU frequency with an even higher processor speed grade and it looks like some serious piece of silicon. Throw in a new chipset featuring the second generation of Twin Bank architecture in form of the nForce2 to combine it with the latest ATI Radeon 9700 Pro and the effect is similar to cold fusion. Needless to say that the RADEON 9700 also works on the Pentium 4 platform we used for comparison. How fast are those systems really, can we overclock them and can we play Sysmark2002? We have all the answers.

Once upon a time, there were reviews that just fell into place, then there were the reviews that were just a lot of work, some more challenging and some turning out a P4ITA2 (a quad pain in a square arse), not to be confused with the ECS board sharing the same acronym as model number. In general, new CPU reviews are on the easier side of things, however, sometimes, there is more to it than meets the eye and that's where things can go haywire to say the least.

The current review introduces not one variable, that is speed grade, not two variables, that is speed grade and bus frequency but three variables, that is speed grade, bus frequency and on top of that, a new platform. Add a few extra bugs for new supported peripherals like SATA HDDs, AGP 8X, and a few new drivers on the software side of things and the simple-appearing task of evaluating a new processor becomes a Pandora's box of Herculean proportions, call it a nightmare if you wish. To make things even worse, throw in a few compatibility issues between e.g. the SIS 648 chipset and the ATI Radeon 9700 card (used for comparisons) and a beta version of mainboard as the primary test bed. Enough said, welcome to the CPU review from hell. Nay, it wasn't really that bad.

Back to the Candidate:

AMD Athlon XP2800+
(Thoroughbred core, 333 MHz FSB)

It took awhile but it finally happened. AMD is officially releasing the XP 2800+ processor, running at 2250 real time MHz and, most importantly, officially endorsing the 166 MHz external CPU bus for a 333 mbps (Megabit / pin / sec) transfer rate between CPU and chipset. Up to now, the official bus interface frequency was 266 MHz which created certain bottlenecks compared to the advanced DDR technology available on the market. Most of the bottlenecks were showing in streaming applications, SiSoft Sandra is but the tip of the iceberg, other applications experienced only minor asthmatic symptoms but across the board, more bandwidth appeared to become necessary as we showed in our recent analysis of the situation.

Briefly, we were looking in detail at different results under different configurations, that is either at 133 MHz with the memory bus running synchronous with the FSB, increasing the memory bus to 166 MHz only or running both buses at 166 MHz. Our results showed that a major performance increase was already achieved just by alleviating the memory bottleneck and that further increasing the FSB to 166/333 MHz added performance depending on the level of prefetch used by the application.

Our earlier results were tied to a 1666 MHz CPU for reasons described in detail in the review, however, we did stress the point that with increasing clock speed, the higher multiplier and associated latencies would effectively kill any performance gain achieved by higher clock speed. Moreover, the performance deltas we reported at already 1666 MHz clock speed were only the beginning, every further increase in speed would also increase the delta between a 133/266 MHz and a 166/333 MHz FSB processor running at the identical clock speed.

In any event, our prayers have been answered, today we are able to introduce the Athlon XP2800+ running at 2.25 GHz stemming from a 13.5 x multiplier and a 166 MHz FSB. Simultaneous with the XP 2800+, a little brother that is the XP 2700+ has been released. Time to take a quick look at the specs.

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