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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HardwareD00d - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Fantastic article, obviously very well thought out.I would have liked to see a comparison between the 4000+ and the "real" FX-53 to really back up your rebadging theory (yeah I know speed+cache+memory width are equal between the two, but just to make sure AMD isn't pulling some magic out of there butt somewhere else).
Marsumane - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Yes, thanks for the XP comparison. I find it interesting how its not performing as well as it used to in games. (doom 3, farcry, cs:s)Also, your ut2k4 benches seem off. How is doom 3 pulling 50% more frames at the same res? Maybe your ut is at 16x12? I pull similar frames on ut w/ my 9800p oced.
ksherman - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
I like the ending... It sounds mysterious!alexruiz - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
I will suggest again to include some Ulead Video Studio 8.0 benchmarks for video encoding. Ulead is by far the fastest consumer grade video editor / renderer, it is the most complete and one of the most popular. In fact, it is almost 50% faster than Pinnacle 9, and almost 100% faster than videowave.Roxio has really been working with Intel as all previous version of video wave ran better on AMD hardware. As reference, results video wave 6 or 7 would be interesting. Newer doesn't always mean better, as you can see from Adobe Premiere. Version 7.0 is quite slower than 6.5 doing the exact same thing in the same platform.
For DivX encoding, a run with virtualdub/virtualdubmod or DVD2AVI would be nice, as they are very fast and extensively used.
Just some comments
Alex
Araemo - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Thank you thank you thank you for including an Athlon XP.This allows me to better judge where my current Barton 2.4 Ghz sits. ;P So I know when an upgrade to the next cheap overclocker will give a good enough performance boost to be worth the money.
stephenbrooks - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Here's an idea to play with: how about some 2D scatter plots of Performance/£ and Performance/Watt? Obviously not on everything - that would clutter it - but perhaps on one or two key things it'd be nice to see.Zar0n - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
EDIT #22 There is no 3400+ for SK 939 only 3500+Zar0n - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
Nice article BUT:You should make C&C power consumption and temperature
Also some OC tests.
The Battle for Value is not correct:
1º WHAT about price of DDR1 VS DDR2?!
2º MB for INTEL are more expensive, ~40€ is a great difference in a MB price.
3º 0.09 AMD are just introduced so they are going to come down, not much but they are.
In order to be fair you should compare with AMD 3400+
AMD as a clear winner here.
mczak - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
power consumption at idle - is this with or without cool 'n' quiet (I suspect without)?Uff - Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - link
I have to agree with #18 - it's not worth paying more than twice the price of a 3400+ just to get 3800+ on 939 platform.Many say 'OH! But s939 is more upgradable!', but if you think about it, by the time you upgrade next there are very likely going to be new motherboards available aswell and you end up upgrading that anyway. Not to mention motherboards cost virtually nothing compared to cpus.