System Setup
Hardware
- ASUS SK8V, Socket 940, VIA K8T800, Opteron/Athlon FX, 1002.006 BIOS
- ASUS K8V Deluxe, Socket 754, VIA K8T800, Athlon 64, 1005.011 BIOS
- ASUS P4S800D-E Deluxe, Socket 478, SiS655TX, Pentium 4
- AMD Athlon FX-51, 1MB L2, 11 x 200MHz
- AMD Athlon 64 Model 3200+, 1MB L2, 10 x 200MHz
- Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz, 512KB L2, 16 x 200MHz
- Western Digital WD360 Raptor, SATA, 36.2GB (ASUS K8V, ASUS P4S800D-E)
- Seagate Barracuda 80GB ATA IV (SK8V)
- ATI Radeon 9800XT (412/730)
Software
- Windows XP Professional w/SP1
- ATI CATALYST 4.1 and Control Panel
- SiS AGP driver 1.17, SiS IDE driver 2.04a, SiS RAID driver 1.05 (ASUS P4S800D-E)
- VIA Hyperion 4.51v (ASUS K8V)
- Intel 5.02.1002 chipset drivers (DFI)
- HEXUS Pifast v41
- Simplisoft HDTach 2.61
- Kribi Bench 1.19
- Sciencemark 2.0
- 3DMark 2001SE v330
- Quake3 v1.30 HQ (four demo)
- LAME 3.92MMX MP3 Encoding(192CBR, U2's Pop album)
- Realstorm Ray Tracing
- X2: The Threat - Rolling Demo
A triplet of ASUS boards for the graphs today, SK8V and FX-51 gets to take on K8V with Model 3200+ Athlon 64 and P4S800D-E with 3.2GHz P4. It's high end Athlon FX versus mid-range Athlon 64 versus cheap and fast high-end Pentium 4. While not a straight fight as such, due to CPU choice (Model 3400+ is out for Socket 754 and 3.4GHz Northwoods can be had too), it lets you see what FX-51 and Socket 940 will get you performance wise, against some common configurations, while letting us evaluate the SK8V.
Can I just say I love the .png image format, that image is just 824 bytes in size. The SK8V saw the FX-51 in the above fashion, running it at just a smidgen over 200MHz HTT frequency.
A big thanks to Corsair for the XMS3500R TwinX 1GB pack, for my dual-channel Athlon FX testing. SK8V saw them just fine and they were run at their rated latencies throughout.
1GB and 2-3-2-6 is a little different to 512MB and 2-2-2-6 on the two other systems on test, but since it's not a straight fight and 1GB of XMS3500R is representative of what FX-51 purchasers will likely choose to run, it's nothing bad. Tras of 6 means we're nearly identical on the memory front anyway, timings wise.