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Since AMD were kind enough to send a complete test system complete with Radeon 9700 Pro graphics and the fact that the Intel 2.8GHz Pentium 4 is the nearest competitor to these new CPU's, a 2.8Ghz P4 system with RDRAM and a Radeon 9700 Pro is the logical choice. So just a straight fight between the baddest P4 rig we could put together and the test AMD rig as sent to me.
• AMD Athlon XP2700+ 'Thoroughbred B' @ 13 x 166MHz FSB (2.17GHz)
• Intel Pentium 4 2.8 'Northwood' @ 21 x 133MHz FSB (2.8GHz)
• Asus A7N8X, nForce2 Chipset, Socket A AMD DDR Motherboard
• Gigabyte GA-8IHXP, Intel i850e Chipset (with ICH4), Socket 478 Intel Pentium 4 RDRAM Motherboard
• 2 x 256Mb Corsair PC3200 DDR Memory Modules (CAS2, 2-5-2)
• 2 x 256Mb Samsung PC800 RDRAM (PC1066 mode, 4 x 133)
• ATI Radeon R9700 Pro 128MB
• Windows XP Professional Build 2600.xpclient.010817-1148
• Plutonium XP 8.1 Radeon Drivers (based on ATI CATALYST build 6166)
• Quake3 v1.30
• 3DMark 2001 Professional Second Edition
• Serious Sam: The Second Encounter Demo
• Comanche 4 Demo Benchmark
• Hexux version of PiFast version 4.1, by Xavier Gourdon
• LAME v3.92 MMX and RazorLame 1.1.5 front end
• VirtualDub and DivX 4.12
• Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo
• OcUK SETI Benchmark
The LAME encoding test is a 192Kbit/sec CBR encode of 12 U2 tracks ripped in .wav format. RazorLame is used to encode them into MP3 format and its GUI used to give a visual indication of the time taken to complete.
The VirtualDub test is a DivX 4.12 encode of the first .VOB from Gone In Sixty Seconds. It's a full 2-pass encode at 1800kbps rate and a stopwatch used to time it.
The rest of the benchmarks you will be familiar with. If you have any questions, email me or hit our forums!
On to the numbers! Remember that the nForce2 motherboard is a semi-production board from Asus that will only undergo tiny tweaks before release very soon (voltage adjust please!). nForce2 has a large hand in the performance figures here and I'll mention it as we go along where appropriate.
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