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| Athlon XP1800+ QuantiSpeed in the Crossfire | |
| (Review by MS, October 14, 2001) |
Performance
What about starting with the prime benchmark for the P4, that is Quake3 Arena? Historically, no AMD system has been able to touch the performance of the Pentium4 with its dual Rambus memory interface on the Intel i850. Recently, as we showed, the SIS 645 reference board, using 333 MHz DDR did outperform the i850 mainboard, though, and set some new records. Time to check how the AthlonXP stacks up against a fierce competition.
Quake3 Arena Demo 001
Fastest, 512 x 384 x 16 bpp
Average frame rates in Demo 001. On the AMD chipset-based Gigabyte board, the Athlon XP 1800+ limps behind the competition, however, the VIA Reference board and the Shuttle AK31 show off and, even at stock speed, hardly yield to the i850 platform, the VIA P4X266-based Shuttle AV40 still gets respectable scores but is unable to secure a leading position. The clear winner is the SIS 645 platform, however, the overclocked Athlon XP is the first AMD CPU to slash a gaping wound into the P4 phalanx by outperforming the i850 / P4 combination at a substantially lower clock speed.
Normal, 640 x 480 x 16 bpp
Moving to the "Normal setting doesn't change anything except that the gap between the i850 and the overclocked Athlon XP widens. The SIS 645 reference board still maintains its position as performance leader with a slim margin. Results with the AK31 using the 21.81 nVidia drivers were excluded form the graphs since they were too low.
At the Fast and High Quality settings we saw the same pattern which is why we skip these settings. Time to move on to another, memory and FPU intensive benchmark: Expendable.
Expendable Timedemo (640 x 480 x 16)
Expendable Timedemo average frame rates. For comparative purposes, the 21.81 driver scores with the Shuttle AK31 are included. On a QuantiSpeed by real clock comparison, the Athlon XP still achieves an average of over 40% performance advantage over the Pentium 4. Clock by clock comparisons would be interesting to discuss but unfair since the P4 was designed for high clock speed.
Gaming applications are more and more limited by the capabilities of the graphics card, rather by the CPU power, Content Creation applications are still limited by raw CPU power. Time to move on.
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