As expected, in business applications that are running from out of the L2 cache, the AMD Thunderbird gains a substantial momentum over the Athlon classic. In ContentCreation Winstone 2000, scores of 40.5 (stock settings) and 41.2 (overclocked) are the highest I have ever been able to achieve so far. Keep in mind that these scores were obtained running Windows98 and not WinNT or 2000 which could boost the scores up another 20%. In Sysmark2000, the Thunderbird is also the first CPU to reach over 200 points at stock setting, that is running at 1 GHz.
In gaming applications, the performance difference between the original Athlon and the Thunderbird appears to be negligible. This is not surprising since the CPU core, particularly the FPU unit have not changed and gaming applications hardly take advantage of higher L2 cache speed.
All in all, the A7V / Thunderbird is a combo that sets new milestones in performance and, thus, the ASUS A7V deserves the rare editorial award of the best Socket A board tested here so far.
Speaking of which, I don’t recall any others but nevertheless …. :-)
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