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By,
Marco Chiappetta
May 13, 2003
We continued our testing with
another DirectX benchmark, Novalogic's combat helicopter
simulation, Comanche 4. Although this is a game
benchmark that can be used to test the relative performance
of video cards, frame rates are strongly influenced by
processor speed and memory bandwidth...
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Novalogic Comanche 4 - DirectX 8 Gaming |
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As CPU Limited As They Get... |
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The Athlon XP 3200+'s higher
core clock and system bus speeds helped it to outperform the 3000+
by approximately 4%. Both of the Pentium 4 systems,
however, held onto a commanding lead. The P4 3.0C was
a full 10 FPS, or 18.2% faster than the 3200+ with the P4
3.06 coming in second place at 60 FPS.
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Quake 3 Arena v1.17 - Demo001 |
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Who thinks we'll break 1000FPS by Year's End? |
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For our last set of benchmarks,
we took some Quake 3 Arena v1.17 Timedemo (Demo001) scores
using the game's "Fastest" quality setting, with audio
disabled. Running Quake 3 with a high-end graphics
card with these minimal settings isolates memory and
processor performance. Frame rates are limited by
the number of polygons and data the CPU and memory
subsystems are able to push through the system bus, without being
limited by the graphics subsystem. As you can see, the Athlon XP 3200+
performed very well in Quake 3. It surged ahead of the 3000+ by 11%, but
unfortunately it could not come
close to catching either of the P4s.
We've run through the gamut of
benchmarks and our minds are made up. AMD's decision
to transition the Barton core to a 400MHz system bus was a
good one. We saw increased performance across the
board and our test system remained completely stable
throughout. The Athlon XP 3200+ is also being
introduced at a price point much more palatable than the
original "Bartons". When the Athlon XP 3000+ was
released back in February, its debut price was set at
$588 each in 1K unit quantities. The Athlon XP 3200+,
however, is being introduced at "only" $464, a full 22%
lower than the 3000+. Basically, there is nothing
negative we can say about AMD's decision to up the Athlon's
FSB. We're also happy to see AMD has release a new CPU
that is clocked higher than their previous high-end
part...even if it is only by few MHz. Simply put, the
Athlon XP 3200+ is one seriously fast CPU, and it's being
supported by a very capable chipset. We must also
commend NVIDIA for designing a chipset in the nForce 2 that
has matured so well. When building a high-end Athlon
rig, there really is no reason to look for a motherboard
based on any other chipset at the moment. The only
caveat is that Intel's flagship parts consistently
outperform the Athlon XP in the majority of benchmarks,
except for the Winstone tests, which don't benefit
significantly from Hyper-Threading or the extra bandwidth
afforded by the P4's architecture. It seems like Intel
expected to be competing against the Athlon 64 by this point
in time and as a result they have solidified their lead in
performance. Keep in mind that the entire landscape
may change a few months from now with the introduction of
the Athlon 64. For now though, we'll conclude our
coverage by giving AMD praise for releasing a powerful CPU
that should quench every speed-freak's thirst...at least
until the "next big thing" arrives...
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