AMD Athlon 64 3800+ - Page 6

SiSoftware Sandra 2004

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.

CPU Arithmetic

Sandra's CPU arithmetic benchmark suite uses 2 famous benchmarks (Dhrystone and Whetstone) for stress testing the processor. Also it includes a new version of the Whetstone test that makes use of a processor's SSE2 instructions to show the performance boost an application might gain should it be optimized for SSE2. Unfortunately this does not always represent a true real-life performance, but is useful to compare the speed of various CPUs.

Note:All Intel results are taken as provided by SiSoftware Sandra 2004.

You can see the outstanding performance we got from the 3800+ with the Dhrystone benchmark. With just 600 iterations per second behind Intel's 4GHz beast, it leaves all other Pentiums behind. However, that's not the case when it comes to the Whetstone benchmark. There, the results for AMD's top Athlon 64 processor are not so pleasant.

Notice the remarkable difference in the Whetstone benchmarks, with and without SSE2 use. Intel was the one to introduce us to these instructions with their P4 processors. As more and more software companies implemented SSE2 code into their applications, AMD finally decided to incorporate it too, starting with all their Athlon 64 and FX products. So no Athlon XP supports SSE2, making a 64-bit processor a much wiser choice if you're considering upgrading in the immediate future.

Without SSE2, the 3800+ ranks fourth in place, with 300 iterations per second more than the P4 3GHz and 200 less that the P4 3.2GHz. Given AMD's much lower CPU clock speed we have to admit it's still impressive that it didn't finish last on this benchmark. However, when it runs the benchmark using SSE2, the 3800+ gets only 1200 more per second, whereas the Intel processors get a boost of approximately 3000 iterations. Here it let us down and dropped to last place with a huge difference from its HyperThreaded competitors.

CPU Multimedia

This test involves the generation of Mandelbrot Set fractals that are used to realistically describe and generate natural objects such as mountains or clouds. By using various multi-media extensions MMX, 3DNow! and SSE(2/3) better performance is achieved.

Here, the benchmark runs on all Pentiums taking advantage of their x8 SSE2 instructions for integers and x4 SSE2 for floating points, whereas on our AMD it could make use of its x4 Enhanced MMX and SSE instructions for integers.
However, it's with floating point calculations where the 3800+ seems to lack in performance, where after it was placed third in the integer test, it managed last for floating point.

Memory

This tests examines how your memory sub-system compares to other systems with the same or similar memory. The benchmark is based on the well-known STREAM memory bandwidth benchmark.

As in all other tests, so in this one we used our high performance 2x512Mb OCZ PC3200 EL 2-2-2-5 dual channel DDR memory modules.

On the chart you can see our results compared to the top 4 memory modules, as included in the latest version of Sisoft Sandra 2004.

No wonder OCZ declares itself as the manufacturer of the best performing DDR memory. Even though we couldn't overclock our processor due to the limitations of the A8V motherboard, the system easily broke the 6000 limit, 400Mb/s above the former fastest memory, on both Integer and Floating-Point calculation tests.