Monday, July 03, 2000

The results of the performance tests

All tests were performed under Win98.

The configuration of the test system was as follows:

Motherboard: AOpen AK72
BIOS: R1.05
CPU: AMD Athlon 1Ghz
Memory: 128MB Corsair PC133 SDRAM CAS2
Primary IDE port Master: Quantum Fireball KA 9.1gig ATA66
Secondary IDE port Master: empty
Secondary IDE port Slave: Kenwood 52X True X CD-ROM
AGP port: GeForce 256
Graphics card drivers: Nvidia 4.11.01.0368
OS: Win98 built 4.10
DirectX 7.0a
GlSetup 1.0.0.110 Beta

Here you can see that the Intel processors - with their on-die L2 caches operating at the same frequency as the CPU core - manage to obtain better performance. It will be interesting to verify these tests results against one of the new AMD Thunderbirds, which also happen to use on-die L2 caches.

In this test, thanks to its superior FPU, the Athlon nearly manages to render the L2 issue null & void. Imagine for a moment, the performance that could be achieved by an Athlon with an internal L2 cache operating on a 1:1 frequency ration with the CPU core...

Once again, the L2 cache proves to be a limiting factor of the Athlon 1GHz, as it takes a place between the PIII 850MHz, and PIII 866MHz from Intel.

Next: Quake 3 Test 1.08