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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southernpac - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
It has been reported elsewhere that the FX55 runs 15 degrees hotter than the 4000+, and that Cool & Quiet are available on both. True? Also, does the new AMD stock fan (with the copper fins and heat pipe) come with the 4000+?ThePlagiarmaster - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
Val,Sounds like you don't know how to build a PC properly. With a good PSU and QUALITY memory (corsair, kingston, crucial etc) you won't experience any problems with AMD systems (with any motherboard). If you still experience problems turn off that damned SPD. Config the memory yourself and problems go away. I don't even use SPD's when setting up customers PC's these days. If there is a way to turn it off and config the memory myself it's the first thing I do.
All SPD's are not created equal (nor are PSU's). Tons of them out there will make your machine run like crap. A simple fix is to kill it and config the memory yourself in the bios.
Learn to read forums and how to troubleshoot your PC.
Plag
nastyemu25 - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
what the hell did val just say?Philbill - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
Sounds to me as though the Intel fanboys are worried :)val - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
53: yes and Acer on all their notebooks and servers :-). And Britney never touched Sprite. Please try to discover what PR means. Google will help ya.val - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
51: to your 820 and other sarcastic notes, everybody makes mistakes, but with intel you have allways choice. If you dont like to buy intel chipset with limited warranty with purpose to be used on cheapest office PCs, you can buy workstation or server based chipset . But what you can choose for AMD? Is there any high durable VIA chipset? Or nvidia, SIS? Dont make me smile.(note: i have 820 in my HTPC and since installed it runs fine)
Sunbird - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
Ferrari uses AMD..... Word!val - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
51: that AMD madness will end one time, and AMD chips (and specialy chipsets for AMD) have not one bug - there is one difference: intel is serious respected company, which doesnt depend on how few overclockers will like or dislike them. They must publish the bugs for this reason. AMD is not publishing any, even that stupid one with JPEG was hidden under carpet as much as was possible. And should we discuss chipsets for AMD now? Like VIA deleting harddrive with ATI card, and many others?Reason why many of them are not scared to install AMD servers is, that demand is not so high. If you have single purpose server with backup, you can run it even on ATA drives and ALI chipset to reach 99.3%.
Name me one company which prefers AMD and doesnt produce intel, name me one industrial computer who support AMDs, one automotive rack test system provider, hospital equipment, avionic systems, and so on. Its not like that few overclockers will not see their page for a ten minutes, its about lifes and lot lot of moneys. And trust me, its not about marketing or idiocy, its about quality and support what you will never get from AMD/taiwan.
Get Intel, and dont fall to temporaly madness.
I know that Hyundai is popular now, but it is not BMW (even when you can get three hyundais for one BMW and even when one is able to drive on straight road same top speed). Respected companies doesnt change so fast.
About benchmarks? I like to see once, where is compared how many interupts and system calls is CPU able to handle. Benchmark with network and soundcard, mouse, keyboard and other utilization. You will be surprised.
Zebo - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
#49 like to spread FUD much? Total BS. That's why Anands, you know the guy who reviews hardware professionally seeing thousands of products a year, been using AMD servers for four years now, right because thier unreliable?? IMO ihere is actually no more effective endorsement of the stability and reliability of AMD platforms than the fact that AnandTech uses them as the sole platform for the web serving of its main site.Need we bring up intels i820, grantsdale, alterwood disasters? Even the prescott has 31 bugs which will blue screen your comp under certain sofware instances. Thus far opteron/A64 has one. Hav'nt you heard about intel recalling processors? Hav'nt you heard about Northwood sudden death syndrome? Hav'nt you heard about HP Recall Thousands of pentium Notebooks for chipset problems?
If there's any instability to be had it's with Intel simply because AMD "offloads" about 80% of a chipsets work to the CPU's interated mem controller now.
Those "AMD bad chipset" museings were all FUD way back when too. No need to rehash them, I will if you want. But Just look what Intel man, TOM's hardware says way back then. http://www.tomshardware.com/mainboard/01q1/010122/...
"The most important finding was the enjoyable fact that each of the tested boards ran 100% stable even at the fastest possible memory timing settings. VIA's upcoming DDR chipsets may not look too impressive right now, but the Apollo KT133A is a matured, fast and solid product that offers good performance."
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q4/001017/athlo...
"AMD Processors are significantly less expensive than Intel processors although they are at least on par in terms of performance. - FACT"
"AMD processors are incompatible. - LIE
Not that the average guy who just heard that phrase would know what the heck 'incompatible' is, but it sounds really bad, doesn't it? Well, even the people who do know that 'incompatible' means that a product wouldn't work reliably with other components (which of course is bad) are wrong if they accuse AMD's Athlon or Duron processors of it. In our labs we are testing all kinds of Athlon platforms with all kinds of different components and I can definitely say that I cannot see any difference between the compatibility of AMD products and platforms compared to the same from Intel."
"Chipsets for AMD processors are inferior to Intel chipsets. - LIE
Yeah, sure, the earth is flat and politicians are honest ... I am still amused when I see people posting the above message in news groups or as their response to articles. How many more times does Intel need to screw up their chipsets (i820, MTH, ...) until you guys get the message? . . . Incompatibilities are more a problem of the motherboard BIOS than of the chipset right now. Thus both chipset makers, Intel as well as VIA, are actually in the same situation."
Stop the hate budda. Get AMD, everyones doing it.:)
val - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
also should the countries to do something with AMD/Intel NVIDIA/ATI cartels. CPU / GC costs so much more than whole mainboard. Thats crazy. More competitors to the battlefield or some kind of regulation is needed.