AMD Athlon XP 2700+ And NVIDIA's nForce 2

The AMD Athlon XP 2700+ With The nForce 2
The Athlon Gets a BUS Speed Increase & A Killer New Chipset

By, Marco Chiappetta
October 1, 2002

We're still on the fence when it comes to MadOnion's PCMark 2002 tests.  Like SiSoft SANDRA, the PCMark tests are designed to isolate the performance of certain subsystems, but they have a "light-duty" feel and it's tough to translate the scores into any real world scenarios.

MadOnion PCMark 2002 Synthetic benchmarks using real world compute functions.

PCMark 2002's CPU Performance Module runs the following tests.

CPU Test:

• JPEG decompression

• Zlib compression & decompression

• Text search

• MP3 Audio Conversion

• 3D Vector Calculation

The Athlon XP 2700+ was again outpaced by the 2.8GHz Pentium 4, but by a very small 210 point margin, with the 2600+ trailing by 250 points.  The Athlon XP 2700+ seems to live up to its branding, posting performance numbers that nip right on the P4 2.8's heels. 

PCMark 2002 Memory Test Technical details: (quoted from MadOnion documentation)

"Raw read, write, and read-modify-write operations are performed starting from a 3072 kilobytes array decreasing in size to 1536 KB, 384 KB, 48 KB and finally 6 KB. Each size of block is tested two second and the amount of accessed data is given as result. In the STL container test a list of 116 byte elements is constructed and sorted by an integer pseudo-random key. The list is then iterated through as many times as possible for 2 seconds and the total size of the accessed elements is given as result. There are 6 runs of this test, with 24576 items in the largest run corresponding to a total data amount of 1536 KB, decreasing in size to 12288 items (768 KB), 6144 items (384 KB), 1536 items (96 KB), 768 items (48 KB) and 96 items in the smallest run corresponding to 6 KB of total data."

NVIDIA seems to have done an excellent job with the nForce 2.  In the PCMark2002 memory performance tests, the combination of the 2700+'s higher bus speed and the nForce 2's memory controller, made for some excellent scores.  Our Athlon / nForce 2 combo did fall 1782 points short of the P4 2.8GHz / PC1066 RDRAM system, but was 1464 points ahead of the KT333 equipped 2600+ reference system.

Gaming Performance - Comanche, 3DMark & Quake 3