Test Setup

There is no doubt that there is some impressive technology in the Athlon 64 but the question remains: with all these architectural improvements over the Athlon XP, do the performance numbers improve? We pit the Athlon 64 3400+ against the Athlon XP 3200+, the P4 3.2 and the P4 3.0 A wide range of tests were run on the Athlon 64. As important as high framerates are in games there are many other benchmarks of CPU performance including media encoding, 3D rendering and synthetic benchmarks and we cover all of these areas to try to paint an accurate picture of the overall peformance of the Athlon 64.

Common Components include -

Geforce FX 5950 53.03
Corsair XMS3200v1.1 256 x 2

The 3200+ was tested with two boards because the Gigabyte decided it had enough of this cruel world and stopped working in the middle of testing. The gaming benchmarks were done on the Gigabyte while the majority of the applications were done on the AOpen.

Memory on the P4 and Athlon 3200+ were run in a Dual Channel configuration.