AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Socket 939 90 nm

Smaller, Cooler, Faster...

by Josh Walrath

Doom 3

            This latest game from Id features some of the finest graphics and artistic design that any game to date has shown.  The amount of art used in each scene is very impressive, and can be very dramatic.  John Carmack gave an ultimatum to his people that he didn’t want any one area to look like another.  I think they achieved that goal (though they could have worked on a gameplay a bit more though…).  I used the standard demo at two resolutions and quality settings.

            At the lowest resolution with the High Quality settings, the overclocked Athlon 64 still scales very nicely in performance.  A 16% increase with overclocking is again what is expected.  When things are really buckled down at Ultra quality (which uses main memory for a lot of texture storage) we can see the overclocked results still provide a small boost (even though the video card is the bottleneck here).

Realstorm 2004

            This raytracing benchmark utilizes the CPU 100%, and has very little to do with the video card.  This makes it an excellent benchmark to see exactly how much faster or slower a processor is compared to others.

            The minimum result is a bit odd here, but as you can see from the maximum and average fps that the overclocked Athlon 64 still scales as promised.  The magic 18% figure continues to rear its ugly head when looking at the average performance.

Half Life 2

            The latest creation from VALvE really utilizes a lot of physics and AI work, and a custom demo was recorded near the end of the canals sequence.  HL2 was set at 1024x768, no AA, no AF, and High Quality.

            We only see a 14% increase in performance here, but with the resolution set as high as it is, it is more of a bottleneck here than the CPU.  Still, the extra 12 fps could help to create a more seamless and immersive experience when things get very complex and bogged down.

Comanche 4 Demo

            This is another very CPU heavy benchmark that doesn’t necessarily stress the video card much.  Resolution was set at 800x600, High Quality, Sound Enabled.

            This time we see an almost 20% increase in performance over stock.  The extra speed and memory bandwidth make a very large impact on this benchmark.

Overclocking and Heat

            During the entire time of this review, the CPU has never exceeded 43 C.  At stock speeds at idle, the CPU sits at around 36 C.  At full load it goes up to 38 C.  This is with the stock AMD cooling.  Even when overclocked the core stayed at 41 C at idle, and reached 43 C at full load.

            Overclocking the 3200+ was very, very easy.  I was able to achieve 2.47 GHz with only a small increase in core voltage.  I was not able to hit 2.5 GHz no matter what voltage was used, though it would boot up and load into Windows at that speed.  Perhaps it might have been stable if I had a better cooling source, but I currently have no way of testing this at the moment (I lack a 3^rd party performance heatsink for the Athlon 64).

            There is one fly in the ointment though.  In testing with this combination I discovered that the memory divider, when set at full speed, is locked at CPU/10.  So basically this is CPU speed divided by 10.  In the case of the 2 GHz 3200+, the memory speed is 200 MHz (400 MHz DDR).  This is of course the specification, but the problem comes when the user tries to overclock their Athlon 64 by using a lower multiplier.  Lets say a user sets their HTT to 250 MHz with their 3200+, but uses the 9 multiplier.  The CPU will be running at 2.25 GHz, and the user expects the memory to be running at 250 MHz (like the HTT setting).  With the divider locked on the CPU, the memory will actually be running at 2.25 GHz/10, or 225 MHz (450 MHz DDR).  While the HyperTransport bus will be running at a full 250 MHz, the memory will only be hitting 225 MHz (far below the expected 250 MHz).

            So those expecting to get better memory performance out of just overclocking the HTT  and memory bus are in for a disappointment.  The only way to successfully overclock the memory in this situation is to raise the CPU speed.  In this case I found 2.45 GHz to be the sweet spot in terms of stability and overall performance with good DIMMS.

            Since October AMD has been integrating strained silicon features into its 90 nm Athlon 64 line, but this is not the recently released DSL technology.  The addition of strained should help these 90 nm Athlon 64’s achieve higher clockspeeds in the very near future.  Still, the 90 nm Athlon 64’s are very solid overclockers, and many are reporting 2.6 GHz on air with the 90 nm 3500+ processors.  Hitting nearly a 500 MHz overclock with the 3200+ is no mean feat, and its performance at that speed matches (and often exceeds) that of the much more expensive Athlon 64 4000+.

Next: Conclusion

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