Athlon 64 Revision E: Unofficial DDR500 Support

Low End Dual Core + New Memory Dividers

With the X2 4800+, we saw that DDR436 offered basically no performance improvement, while DDR480 was a little more useful, bringing us anywhere between 1% and 5% of a performance improvement in our selection of tests. Given that the X2 4200+ has half the cache, its dependence on a faster memory bus should go up. But counteracting that relationship is the fact that the 4200+ runs 200MHz slower than the 4800+.

According to our table of supported DDR frequencies by the DFI board, the 2.2GHz 4200+ gives us two options above DDR400 - mainly, 220MHz and 244MHz, or an unofficial DDR440 and DDR488, respectively.

Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004

We start off with MCC Winstone 2004 again:

Memory Speed	MMCC Winstone 2004	% Improvement over DDR400
DDR400	38.9	N/A
DDR440	39.1	1%
DDR488	39.4	1%

3D Rendering

3D rendering is another area where we see good use of dual core processors, but these tests also showed us a 0 - 1% increase in performance when comparing DDR480 to DDR400:

Memory Speed	3dsmax 6 - SPECapc Rendering Composite	% Improvement over DDR400
DDR400	2.54	N/A
DDR440	2.54	0%
DDR488	2.54	0%

Memory Speed	Cinebench 2003	% Improvement over DDR400
DDR400	584	N/A
DDR440	586	0%
DDR488	587	1%

Despite the decrease in cache size, the faster memory bus didn’t do anything more for the X2 4200+.

Video Encoding

Memory Speed	DivX 6 + AutoGK	% Improvement over DDR400
DDR400	47.3	N/A
DDR440	47.9	1%
DDR488	48.5	3%

Here, DDR488 only gives us a 3% bump in performance. Nothing to write home about, but if your memory can support it, you might as well enable it.

Memory Speed	Windows Media Encoder 9 (fps)	% Improvement over DDR400
DDR400	3.88	N/A
DDR440	3.91	1%
DDR488	3.92	1%

Gaming

Memory Speed	Doom 3 (1024 x 768 fps)	% Improvement over DDR400
DDR400	108	N/A
DDR440	111.2	3%
DDR488	113.6	5%

In Doom 3, the X2 4200+ gets slightly more of a performance boost than the 4800+. But despite our theories, it seems that the X2 4200+ doesn’t really get any more of a performance boost than what the 4800+ did.

Just for curiosity's sake, we performed a DVDShrink encode while running the Doom 3 test, to see how two relatively memory bandwidth intensive tasks running simultaneously changed the picture, if at all. Note that alone, DVDShrink saw no performance boost due to DDR488 over DDR400:

Memory Speed	Doom 3 (1024 x 768 fps) w/ DVDShrink running	% Improvement over DDR400
DDR400	102.5	N/A
DDR488	109.2	6.5%

The performance boost in Doom 3 in this scenario went up another 1.5%, to 6.5% for DDR488 over DDR400. It wasn’t a huge jump, but once you start getting into those heavy usage scenarios, then the faster memory speeds make a lot of sense for the dual core Athlon 64 X2s.

Other lighter multitasking scenarios offered no real difference in performance for the X2.

Memory Speed	DVD Shrink (Time in Mins) w/ Firefox & iTunes Running	% Improvement over DDR400
DDR400	9.9	N/A
DDR488	9.9	0%