The AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Processor Review

Benchmarking setup

Test Systems

Both AMD systems will use identical hardware which will include the following”

• DFI Lan Party NF4 Ultra motherboard
• 1 GB Corsair XMS 3200XL memory @ 2-3-2-5
• ATI Radeon X850 XT video card
• Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB HDD

Both Intel systems will use the exact same setup, and also use as much as the same hardware as the AMD systems as possible. where obviously the Intel system is based on a different chipset and memory, I decided that the comparison would be as much from a financial standpoint as performance.

• ASUS P5WD2 Premium motherboard
• 1 GB Corsair DD2 PC5400 UL @ 3-2-2-8
• ATI Radeon X850 XT video card
• Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB HDD

The DFI board is using the 623-3 BIOS (latest official release), and the ASUS board is using the 4-22 BIOS (again, latest official release). All testing was done on a fresh install of Windows XP with SP2.

Benchmarking dual core processors at this time is still fairly difficult, as there just aren’t many prorams out there to really do it right. What I decided in the end was to run our normal suite of benchmarks, then follow that up with some multi tasking, running the same benchmarks again with Norton Anti-Virus.

• 3DMark05 (CPU Test)
• 3DMark03 (CPU Test)
• Aquamark 3 (CPU Test)
• PCMark 05
• Sisoft Sandra 2005 (CPU Arithmetic)
• Super Pi Mod 1.4
• Cinebench 2003
• Far Cry
• Doom 3