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While I was tempted to go into detail on the previous page about memory controller performance and how it effects overall performance in the system, I'll just briefly mention it here. Canterwood and nForce2 have 2 of the lowest latency discrete, off-CPU, memory controllers you'll ever see. Wasted memory bandwidth is measured in low single figure percentage points on each chipset. So it's vital that we feed the processor using such a controller and that means using the lowest latency highest performance memory modules you can lay our hands on.
In terms of the Athlon XP review kit sent out by AMD, they chose Asus again as the motherboard partner as they did last time I looked at an AMD processor with XP2700+ and it's an updated version of the same motherboard used then that they shipped here. So into the limelight steps the Asus A7N8X Deluxe 2.0. Sharing the same features as the old Deluxe (as far as I'm aware), the 2.0 version simply features the up to date nForce2 Ultra 400 northbridge silicon in place of the old stepping and is capable of 200MHz front side bus frequency out of the box with no coercion or fancy tricks. Just feed it a capable processor and 200MHz operation is simple, just like the new P4 enjoys with Canterwood and Springdale.
Last time around Corsair was chosen to supply the memory for the XP2700+ review kit and this time around it's no different. XMS3200 modules do the talking with their fancy heatspreaders and holographic logos. However any good DDR400 modules would do just as well. From AMD's point of view with these review kits, why change what works? Asus and Corsair work for me at any rate.
The last part of the review kit experience is a GlacialTech Igloo heatsink of unknown lineage. I'm not quite sure what Igloo model was chosen other than it's a copper based, multi fin aluminium cooler with an utterly annoying ~7600rpm fan.
So what are we going to pit it against? 3.0C and Canterwood are the fastest that Intel have at the moment so it would be rude not to pit XP3200+ against that, along with some older XP3000 results on a 166MHz front side bus in the non GPU bound benchmarks. ATI Radeon 9700 Pro as the graphics card lets us remove the GPU from the equation as much as possible, very useful on a processor review. Here's the full rundown in handy bullet list form.
• AMD Athlon XP3200+ 'Barton' Processor, 2200MHz, 512KB L2 cache, 11 x 200MHz, Socket A
• AMD Athlon XP3000+ 'Barton' Processor, 2167MHz, 512KB L2 cache, 13 x 166MHz, Socket A
• Intel Pentium 4 'C' Processor, 3000MHz, 512KB L2 cache, 15 x 200MHz, Socket 478
• Asus A7N8X Deluxe 2.0 motherboard, nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset, Socket A
• Intel 875BZ 'Bonanza' motherboard, i875P chipset, Socket 478
• ABIT NF7-S motherboard, nForce2 chipset, Socket A
• 2 x 256MB Corsair XMS3200 memory, CL2, 6-2-2, DDR400 on the Asus motherboard
• 2 x 256MB Mushkin PC3500 memory, CL2, 6-2-2, DDR333 on the ABIT motherboard
• 2 x 256MB Kingmax PC3200 memory, CL2.5, 6-3-2, DDR400 on the Intel motherboard
• ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
• Windows XP Professional Build 2600.xpclient.010817-1148
• ATI CATALYST 3.2
• Intel Application Accelerator 3.0 RAID Edition and 5.00.1009 chipset drivers
• NVIDIA nForce 2.03 drivers
• DirectX 9.0 Runtime
• Hexus Pifast v41
• Lame v3.91 MP3 encoding with Razor-Lame 1.15 front-end using U2's Pop album
• Hexus SETI benchmark
• 3DMark 2001SE v330
• UT2003 Demo (Build 2006)
• Comanche 4 Demo
• Serious Sam 2 Demo
• Quake3 v1.30
HyperThreading was enabled on the Intel system throughout.
In the graphs, "Intel 3.0/200/200 CW" represents the Intel Canterwood system with the 3GHz processor, "AMD 2.2/200/200 NF2U400" represents the 2.2GHz XP3200+ on nForce2 Ultra 400 and "AMD 2.16/166/166 NF2" represents the XP3000+ at 2.16GHz with nForce2.
You'll notice the XP3000+ results disappear on some of the GPU bound tests due to lack of comparison testing with an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro on that system.
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