AMD Athlon 64 4000+ & FX-55: A Thorough Investigation
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 19, 2004 1:04 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Justifying a Rating: Athlon 64 4000+ vs. Athlon 64 3800+
Given difficulty hitting 2.6GHz on the 130nm process, AMD rebadged the FX-53 as an Athlon 64 4000+, making the only difference between it and the 3800+ a matter of 512KB of L2 cache as they both run gait 2.4GHz. But this leaves us with a very important question, does the additional L2 cache actually justify an increase in model number? Remembering that the Athlon 64 has an on-die memory controller it's obvious that the CPU will benefit less from a larger cache than something like the Pentium 4, which does not have the benefit of always having extremely low latency memory accesses. It's even more important to look at this rating carefully since we have no comparison point from Intel as there will be no 4GHz Pentium 4. Armed with this question of justification, let's look at what our results have told us:
In Business/General Use tests, the Athlon 64 4000+ offered the exact same performance as the 3800+ in three tests, and outperformed its predecessor by an average of 3.8% in 7 tests. Given AMD's 5% increase in model number, we'd say that when it comes to Business/General Use performance, the processor has earned its keep.
In the Multitasking Content Creation tests, the 4000+ averaged a 4.5% advantage in two of the five tests, but offered no performance improvement in the remaining three. Here we have a more questionable use of the 4000+ rating.
In the Video Creation/Photo Editing tests, the 4000+ was actually faster in all of the tests, but only by an average of 0.8% - definitely not justifying the rating increase.
Looking at A/V Encoding, the 4000+ tied with the 3800+ in one test and outperformed its predecessor by 1.2% on average in the remaining 4 tests - here we have, once again, much more borderline use of the 4000+ rating.
As far as gaming performance goes, the Athlon 64 4000+ offers a performance improvement in 8 out of our 10 tests, averaging 3.1% faster than the 3800+. Considering we're talking about a rating increase of 5%, that's not too bad.
The Athlon 64 4000+ averaged 3.9% faster than the 3800+ in two out of the three 3dsmax rendering tests, somewhat justifying its rating considering that the one test it did not show an improvement in was a geometric mean of four individual render times.
Finally in our Workstation performance tests the Athlon 64 4000+ barely offers any improvement over the 3800+. In 8 out of the 9 tests the 4000+ averaged 0.6% faster than the 3800+, while offering no performance gain in the remaining test.
So what does the Athlon 64 4000+'s scorecard look like? Does it earn its rating?
Business/General Use - Yes
Multitasking Content Creation - Yes
Video Creation/Editing and Photoshop - No
Audio/Video Encoding - No
Gaming - Yes
3D Rendering with 3dsmax - Borderline
Workstation Performance - No
So despite the increase in model number, the Athlon 64 4000+ gives very little reason for rejoice other than for hopefully cheaper 3800+ prices.
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coolme - Monday, January 10, 2005 - link
#85 yeah, but when comparing to Tom's Hardware review, it's totally off track... (Tom's is more believeble because there is pics of how he measured it and based on the fact that there is no way a A64 could handle 200+ watts)http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041115/pentium4...
how Tom tested it: http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041115/pentium4...
eight - Monday, December 27, 2004 - link
Has anyone information about A64 performance with Premiere Pro 1.5? I assume thet A64 does beat P4, but assumption is mother of... :)euanw - Tuesday, November 9, 2004 - link
#44Wesley,
I am very impressed by your articles. Can you inform me of the procedure you used to overclock the FX55? With the Neo2 board I am not clear on CPU vid and CPU voltage, what do they mean? When I change the multiplier to 13.5 my new PC reaches winXP and then reboots.
My setup is MSI K8N-Neo2-54G, FX-55, 2 x 512MB - OCZ EL DDR PC-3200 Platinum Rev2, Nvidia Quadro FX3000, 2x Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 120 GB, Matrox RTX-100 real time video editor, Antec TrueBlue 480W ATX-12V, BenQ DVD Dual DW1610, WinXP-SP2.
euanw - Tuesday, November 9, 2004 - link
#44Wesley,
Gioron - Sunday, October 24, 2004 - link
While I'm unsure of the exact method used in this review, I'm sure that there is no built-in power measurement devices on the motherboards and processors listed (unless its new and no one told me...) so its NOT just just a matter of installing software that can read a sensor thats already there (as in all the CPU temp monitors). This means it requires some hardware to measure the voltage and current flow to various components (or you can cheat a little and assume the voltage is constant and just measure current).Unfortunately, this is not as easy as it sounds, since isolating various components can be a problem. Its fairly easy to measure things like hard drive power useage since there is only one power connector going to it and its easy to access, so you measure the current on the 5v line and the current on the 12v line, and you're pretty much done. Things like CPUs, motherboards and graphics cards are a bit more difficult. On the newer graphics cards you can measure the power consumption from the additional molex connector, but in all likelyhood, the card will also draw a certain amount of power from the AGP slot power lines, and no one in their right mind is going to unsolder the AGP slot and raise it half an inch in an attempt to put a current sensor in line with the power leads. Thus, you need to rely on indirect means and educated guesses. You can measure the current going into the motherboard, but how much of that is going to the chipset, the CPU, the RAM and the graphics card? You can swap in a different CPU and see how it changes, but that won't give you absolute readings. You can try to remove the CPU and see what power the MB uses without one, but odds are it'll use more power when its actually interfacing with a CPU instead of beeping error codes at you.
Bottom line: There is no easy way to measure power consumption, and even dedicated hardware review sites have problems with it. Personally, I trust Anand far enough that I'm sure he didn't completely screw it up, and the numbers he has are probably close enough to the real thing. I'd forget about measuring power for myself.
xsilver - Friday, October 22, 2004 - link
Kinda late on the comments but..If anand or anybody can answer -- what is used to measure the "power consumption" software? or hardware? links? I would like to test this myselfthanks
Bakwetu - Friday, October 22, 2004 - link
Whoah, it's been a while since I checked out cpu reviews and I must say Amd has some impressive cpu:s nowadays. Even though I am budget oriented when it comes to buying hardare, I'd choose the 3400+ model before the 3200+, it's not all that much more expensive and seems to perform much bettert - Friday, October 22, 2004 - link
79uhuh.... and in a server type situation, how many raid arrays are ran off the chipset controllers? not many i would wager..
hell... u prolly have an independent fibre optic raid array :)
hardware, baby, hardware.
t.
knitecrow - Friday, October 22, 2004 - link
I always knew women were trouble when it comes to technology ;)screech - Thursday, October 21, 2004 - link
nice ones #79, 78. :)