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We tested our
AMD Athlon XP 2200+ using a VIA KT333 based motherboard from
Gigabyte, the GA-7VRX, with 512MB (2x256MB) of TwinMos
PC2700 DDR memory. The rest of the hardware used in
our test system is outlined on the next page. For now
let's take quick look at the motherboard and memory.
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The
Supporting Cast Members |
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What's Under the
Hood? |
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The Gigabyte
GA-7VRX is a feature rich board powered by the VIA KT333
chipset. The GA-7VRX has an on-board ATA/133 capable
Promise RAID controller, Creative Labs on-board sound, an
on-board NIC and USB 2.0. This board also proved to be
very stable, only exhibiting instability when overclocked
well beyond specifications (although not as high as we would
have liked). Also visible in the above picture, is the
Taisol CPU cooler we used with the Athlon XP 2200+.
Due to the smaller surface area of the core, there is less
contact area between the CPU and heatsink. To help
insure proper cooling, AMD will be recommending better
coolers with higher contact pressure for use with the
"Thoroughbred" based Athlons.
The two TwinMos
256MB sticks of PC2700 DDR RAM we used, were populated by
eight 6ns WinBond chips, rated to run at 2.5-3-3. Our
particular modules ran at CAS 2 without a problem though, so
that's where we left them set throughout testing.
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Overclocking
The
2200+ |
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An AMD .13
core...Very Interesting! |
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I'm sure all of
you overclockers out there will no doubt be familiar with
what's visible in the above picture. The Athlon XP
2200+ we tested came with all of the L1 bridges
left intact. Like all of the older socketed Athlons, having
connected L1 bridges should unlock the processor and allow
for altering of the multiplier. Unfortunately, the
Gigabyte motherboard we used for testing our CPU would not
post if we made any adjustments to the multiplier. We
then set out to overclock our processor by raising the FSB,
but were only able to hit a maximum of 142MHz at default
voltage, which equated to a clock speed of 1917MHz. We
tried raising the core voltage and going higher, but our CPU
would not go any higher and remain stable. The highest
speed we were able to boot into Windows was 1984MHz
(13.5x147), but running any program crashed the system.
We tried to hit 2GHz, but the system would not POST, sorry
folks! Frankly, we were expecting more out of this CPU
but suspect that because it was an early sample, and the
Taisol cooler we used wasn't exactly a high-performance
model, there wasn't much headroom.
While
overclocking, we paid close attention to CPU temperatures
and noticed that the "Thoroughbred" did not run much cooler
than a similarly clocked "Palomino". As an experiment,
we installed an Athlon XP 2100+ onto the Gigabyte
motherboard we used, and raised the FSB to 138MHz to bring
the clockspeed up to 1800MHz. Using the same Taisol
cooler, we saw temperatures ranging from 47 - 55 degrees
Celsius on the "Palomino" based 2100+. With the
"Thoroughbred' based 2200+, at it's default clock speed, we saw
temperatures ranging from 44 - 53 degrees Celsius, a
difference of approximately 7%. We were hoping to see much
lower temperatures than this but with the much smaller
contact area, dissipating heat efficiently is going to be
the challenge. It's going to be interesting to see
what type of cooler AMD ultimately ships with their boxed
processors. Perhaps a nice all Copper model will
absorb heat from the core a little better?
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The
Athlon XP 2200+ Exposed |
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What Makes This Baby
Tick? |
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Using WCPUID,
you can see the AMD Athlon 2200+ is running at an actual
clock speed of 1800MHz (1807MHz in our screenshot due to the
aggressive timings of the GA-7VRX motherboard). This
clock speed is attained using a multiplier of 13.5 and a
front side bus of 133Mhz. (13x133=1800). We also took
a snapshot of the CacheID information and the Standard and
Enhanced feature flags. Athlon XPs are equipped with
64K of 2-Way set associative Instruction L1 cache, 64K of
2-Way set associative data L1 cache and 256K of full speed,
16-Way set associative L2 cache, for a grand total of 384K
of effective on chip cache. Later in the year AMD will
be introducing the "Barton" core, which will increase on-die
cache to 512K, which should give them a nice boost in
performance.
On to
the Benchmarks!
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