Athlon 64 X2: New Memory Dividers and Multitasking Performance
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 12, 2005 2:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Multitasking with Doom 3
Gaming performance also had a reasonable improvement in our first article, with DDR480 realizing a 4% increase in performance over standard DDR400. We paired the Doom 3 benchmark with a WME9 encoding task and watched the performance go up even further:| Doom 3 Performance (fps - higher is better) | DDR400 | DDR480 | % Improvement |
| Doom 3 w/ background WME9 | 85.1 | 93.3 | 9.6% |
Pairing up two memory-bandwidth intensive tasks, we see a very noticeable 9.6% increase in performance. It’s generally said that you really start to notice performance improvements of about 10%, and with this particular situation, we are right there.
Multitasking with 3dsmax
Not all multitasking scenarios proved to be so happy with the added memory bandwidth, and this next test is an example of just that.For this test, we combined a 3dsmax 6 render task with MP3 playback as well as our standard Firefox browser test (with 12 open tabs, featuring a decent amount of flash).
| 3dsmax Render Time in Seconds (lower is better) | DDR400 | DDR480 |
| 3dsmax + MP3 + Firefox | 99.828s | 98.813s |
The performance improvement that DDR480 offered was basically next to nothing, which shows that not all multitasking environments are particularly memory bandwidth intensive.
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Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, August 12, 2005 - link
DDR480 is the fastest speed you can run on the Athlon 64 X2 4800+ on the DFI board using the new dividers. DDR500 is possible on the Athlon 64 X2 3800+.Take care,
Anand
Diasper - Friday, August 12, 2005 - link
Also, a further point might be to examine how running 4 x 512MB sticks at 2T might affect things - I guess we can say the bandiwidth loss of running it at 2T will affect performance significantly so compared to someone running DDR500 @1T with decent timings.Diasper - Friday, August 12, 2005 - link
Moreover, I guess AMD's move to DDR2 does begin to make sense as when both cores are fully taxed that bandwidth will be needed.DDR2 is set to get cheaper while timings are also tightening
eg Corsair's new 512MB sticks that are rated at 3-2-2 675mhz stuff and have been o/c to around 709mhz or their 1GB sticks which are doing 3-3-3 at DDR533 (http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.cfm?page=4&...">http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.cfm?page=4&...
In short it seems that DDR2 is getting much closer performancewise to DDR but offers guaranteed bandwidth which X2 can clearly benefit from. 1GB modules that do DDR500 are few and expensive whereas while that's still true of DDR2 now, DDR2 is still being developed where we will see future refinements providing lower latencies/higher speeds at an increasingly affordable price point - DDR is no longer being developed while it is feasible that DDR and especially premium sticks might get more expensive as the market slowly shrinks.
In all, AMD have probably picked a rather opportune time to migrate to DDR2.