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| AMD Athlon XP3200+ A Deja Vu Review That Did Happen | |
| (Review by MS, May 13, 2003) |
BIOS Issues
We didn't specifically mention it yet but another factor that severely influences the overall system performance is the BIOS. The ASUS A7N8X 2.0 came with BIOS revision 1004A, which appeared somewhat on the slow side of things, especially when we compared the initial benchmark results to those we got with the Athlon 3000+ running at 11 x 197 MHz in our sneak preview. To make a long story short, the 1004A BIOS was supplied for stability reasons but since we did not like the performance, we flashed to the earlier 1003 binaries downloaded from the ASUS website. We'll have some comparative data throughout the review but as a start, let's take a look at SiSoft Sandra memory benchmark scores.
SiSoft Sandra
Even though Sandra does not tell very much about chipset latency parameters such as R/W turnaround, data phase latencies and similar, it gives some good indication of the overall performance of the memory bus and of how aggressively the BIOS is tuned.
Because we saw the same performance delta in all preliminary benches across the board (3DMark2001SE, Comanche4), we ran all subsequent benchmarks using the 1003 BIOS only
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