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The last release of the Palomino core AMD CPUs certainly deserves a review, even if it is only a shortee. Instead of repeating the usual benchmarks over and again, we want to take a different approach to show which parameters will influence system performance and why we won't see much higher performance increases on a system level even with higher CPU speed grades, at least not in complex applications.

This dominant role of the IDE / UATA interface for the outcome of benchmarks has over the past 3 years been the reason for us to take most complex benchmarks as, e.g. Winstone Content Creation or Sysmark 2001 / 2002 with a barrel, rather than a grain of salt. A simple change in HDD or even the version of IDE drivers used can cause as much as 30-40% difference in the outcome of the benchmark as we pointed out some three years ago in several articles and, therefore, these benchmarks are certainly great to compare Dell vs. Gateway but not suitable to show "lower" performance of any given component over another unless every single component, including drivers, is physically identical.

Athlon XP 2000+ vs. XP2100+
Distinguishing factor is the malachite-green OPGA as well as some rearrangements under the hood involving remapping of the multiplier settings to the L10 bridges.

What we still can do is to play devil's advocate and say: "We don't count performance hits in comparisons of one system against another. Let others screw up, we only gun for the high score. Call it ignorance or arrogance but here we are, challenging anybody to "Catch us if you can". Fair enough?

We have a full disclosure of the system setup and configuration for anybody to replicate as we progress through the review and will be glad to accept any higher scores as long as they are real.

The benchmark in question is Winstone Content Creation 2001 and there are no holds barred in terms of overclocking or choice of components as long as there is no cheating involved and the benchmarks can be replicated anywhere and by anybody who has enough cash to purchase a Kryogenic facility to overclock the Athlon XP2100+ to 4 GHz real clock speed.

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