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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
89 Comments
View All Comments
val - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
for me is AMD unacceptable until there are good chipsets. All i have ever seen or had in my computers was big garbage with permanent problems and mysterious difficulties.Even SIS chipsets looks much better for intel than SIS for AMD. Its not anymore about CPU, CPU are fast for many tasks and that few percent of price or performance makes no deal, but overall quality talks strongly for Intel.
Save your time AMD fanboys to reply me something like that your AMD platform runs perfect and you had problems with intel and so on, its cheap and cannot anyway motivate me for change.
And yes, i have 2 AMD and 2 Intel computers and many i had or seen before (at home, work, school, projects, customers).
Gnoad - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
3GHZ! Wow, I already was an AMD fan, but that just totally blows me away. Crazy stuff.GoHAnSoN - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
nice article. Thxcoldpower27 - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Very nice, I await the day AMD releases a 3GHZ Athlon 64. These processor are niced but priced in a range where volumes are rather low, they have nice bragging rights though :PDa DvD - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
3GHz on air :SAMD's really out of trouble for the coming year(s)
I can imagine K8@90nm scaling well beyond 3GHz...
(lol, or even top Prescott clockspeeds? That would be insane..)
Wesley Fink - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
#30 and #43 -Once AMD informed us that strained silicon was used in the FX55 I couldn't resist a bit of a run with overclocking the FX55. The nForce4 Reference boad is not really intended or designed for overclocking, since it doesn't have any CPU or memory voltage adjustments. However it does support a wide range of multipliers so I could try a few settinngs.
I had no probelm at all running at 14.5X or 2.9GHz at default voltage. At that speed I ran quite a few benchmarks and a Quake 3 of 604.2 FPS. The FX55 actually booted at 3.0GHz but it never made it through a stable XP boot. I suspect with just a bit of CPU voltage 3.0GHz would be possible with the FX55 on air. All cooling was just the new AMD stock fan which now includes copper fins and heat pipes.
verybusy - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
There is some FX55 and 4000+ overclocking info at http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.cfm?page=2&...Assuming that my request from above is granted regarding other overclocking of 3500+, 3200+ and 3000+, I'd like to see just how overclocking turns out with the retail heatsink and fan. I hope that's not too much of a request.
Thanks...
verybusy - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
I liked the review of the Athlon 64 4000+ and FX-55 and it was nice to see it compared to the other Athlon 64 3200+ and 3000+ processors running at stock speeds.Unfortulately, with this review following so closely behind the 3500+ and 3000+ review (.09 Athlon 64: Value, Speed and Overclocking), it would have been very useful to see the 3500+, 3200+ and 3000+ overclocked to 2.6GHz as well. Afterall, the .09 3500+/3000+ @290x9 is faster than the FX53 (2.4GHz-1MB) err I mean Athlon 64 4000+). The overclocked 3500+, 3200+ and 3000+ could be pretty much as quick as the FX55 couldn't it?
That's what I want to see anyway.
ViRGE - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
#39, Anand mentions that it's multiplier locked.Zebo - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Guys the 3400 newcastle is a way underated chip. It should have been, by all rights, called a 3600. I guess they did'nt want the 3500 to look bad agains a "old" 754 newcastle though.As for the review, total AMD performance domination at low relative speeds temps and power consumption.:) Youd have to be a fool to buy intels netburst crap right now.