AMD Athlon 64 3200+ and the Asus K8V Deluxe

by Josh Walrath

     SiSoft Sandra Max is a very handy little benchmark to test a variety of performance aspects. The two tests I use the most are the memory bandwidth and hard drive performance benchmarks.

     The results here are quite interesting. The Athlon XP 3000+ is running at 166 MHz bus and memory speed, so it is reaching fairly close to the theoretical 2700 MB/sec that DDR 333 can net. Still, the results from the Athlon 64 3200+ is much closer to the theoretical 3200 MB/sec limit of DDR 400. I have an Athlon XP 3200+ running in another nForce 2 board, and it gets around 2800 MB/sec running at DDR 400 with a bus speed of 400 MHz DDR. Remember, the Athlon XP/nForce 2 combo are running a dual DDR channel setup, so its theoretical bandwidth should be 5.4 GB/sec.

     The drive results are a bit odd. The A7N8X is running the Silicon Image SATA controller, which should theoretically give quite a bit more performance than the integrated VIA controller. This could very well be due to BIOS issues with the A7N8X. In other tests I have witnessed, the Silicon Image controller has up to 4X the I/O transactions as other controllers on the market. Still, the Athlon 64 and K8V combo make a nice combination.

     A couple of things really stand out in this test. First off is the burst speed, which should be approaching 120 MB with both controllers. As you see, neither get anywhere near that. The second is the Max sustained throughput, of which the K8V is about 4 MB/sec faster than the A7N8X. This could be in part due to the Silicon Image chip being on the PCI bus, while the VIA SATA controller is integrated into the Southbridge, bypassing the need to put it on the PCI bus. The second thing that stands out is the CPU utilization. The Silicon Image drivers are quite mature, and the hardware is robust. The VIA solution eats up the clock cycles of the CPU in hard drive transactions. This could really hurt overall performance in transaction heavy applications.

     Aquamark 3 is a new benchmark to the market, and it does a nice job in presenting the overall results, and then dividing out how well the graphics card does from the CPU. As you can see in the results, the Athlon 64 3200+, even though it runs at 2 GHz vs. the Athlon XP 3000+’s 2.166 GHz, far outpaces the XP product running on the nForce 2 motherboard. The score for the graphics card does not change, while the CPU power is significantly greater going from the AXP 3000+ to the A64 3200+. The Athlon 64 does appear to be a significant upgrade in this situation (and in others as we shall soon see).

     The differences between the two systems is actually quite impressive, considering they both use the same video card. In these tests, the video card is the part that is stressed the most, but even with that in mind, the Athlon 64 really takes a significant lead over the XP 3000+. Gunmetal is a fairly complex benchmark with lots of action, polygons, AI, and other performance sucking features. To have a 16% increase in performance on the first benchmark, and then to further increase that amount by another 18% for the second benchmark is just plain impressive.

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