Navigate: Advice Beginners BIOS Guide CPUs Links Mainboards Memory Network Storage Video/Sound Cards Contact Forum SiteMap Sponsors WebNews Home	.	.
Prices: Mainboards ABIT ASUS Chaintech Shuttle Soyo Tyan CPU Intel P4 2.4C-800 P4 2.6C-800 P4 2.8C-800 P4 3.0-800 P4 3.2-800 AMD AthlonXP XP 1700+ XP 2000+ XP 2400+ XP 2500+ XP 2700+ XP 3000+ XP 3200+ Athlon64 Athlon64 3200+ Athlon64 FX-51 Opteron Opteron 240 Opteron 242 Opteron 244 Opteron 246 Memory Corsair Crucial Kingston Mushkin OCZ Search Prices:

• AMD Athlon XP 1900+
• AMD Athlon XP 1800+
• EPoX 8KHA+
• 256 MB Mushkin High Performance PC2100 DDR
• MSI StarForce 822
• IBM Deskstar GXP 60 20GB (ER20A44A)
• Pioneer 12 x DVDROM
• Windows 98 SE

The reason for using the EPoX 8KHA+ is that this board shows the highest performance of all KT266A-based mainboards tested here so far. Even though the performance bump is only in the order of some 1-2% over the Shuttle AK31 Rev.3, it is justified to use the board with the very highest performance as platform for evaluating CPU performance.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Benchmarks Explained

We are using the following relevant and irrelevant (from a user perspective) benchmarks:

Incoming Gameindex

Even though this benchmark is hopelessly outdated, I still have the ambition of one day beating the 500 fps barrier. This goes back to a discussion with Brett (3Finger) Jacobs, the originator of the Crusher and other Quake2 demos and we'll see that there is still some ground to be covered.

Expendable Timedemo

Not quite as outdated as a game as Incoming but much more FPU intensive than Incoming. In addition, memory and chipset latencies play an important role, just what we need here.

Quake3 Arena

Still one of the most widely played games and the center of numerous LAN parties. Quake3 Arena may be outdated but is still useful for any performance comparison, particularly between two CPUs on the same platform.

Caligari TrueSpace 4.2 PublicBench

An animated CAD benchmark running in D3D or OpenGL mode which is highly SSE optimized and, therefore provides an extremely well suited application for evaluation of SSE performance. We have used Caligari for almost 3 years now, starting with some 4 fps in D3D and 0.5 fps in OpenGL on the K6-2 400 which only underscores the performance of the current systems. The interesting part about the OpenGL benchmark is that it appears to be an exact measure of the floating point performance of any CPU.

Caligari TrueSpace 5.1

The Vase-Scene is used for ray-tracing / 3D rendering (Thanks to Adam Trachtenberg for supplying the scene). 3D rendering does not take advantage of 3Dnow! or SSE but scales with raw CPU power. Results are given in Runtime in Seconds.

Ulead MediaStudioPro 6.0

The currently most advanced video rendering software available combines the performance of the memory subsystem with raw CPU power. Differences in the benchmark can amount to minutes or hours of time-saving for the home or professional video editor.

next page:    => On to the Testing =>