Are Three Cores Better Than Two?

Features
By published

Test Setup

System Hardware

Socket 775 Processors

AMD Opteron 248

(Sledgehammer 130 nm, 2.2 GHz, 1 MB L2 Cache)

AMD Opteron 275

(Italy 90 nm, 2.2 GHz, 2x 1 MB L2 Cache)

AMD Platform

Asus K8N-DL (Socket 940), Rev. 1.03

NVIDIA nForce Professional 2200, BIOS 1006

RAM I

Corsair CM72SD512RLP-3200

2x 512 MB DDR-400 (200 MHz, CL3-3-3-8, 1T)

RAM II

Crucial 18VDDF12872G-40BD3

2x 1024 MB DDR-400 (200 MHz, CL3-3-3-8, 1T)

Hard Drive I

Western Digital WD740 Raptor

74 GB, 10,000 rpm, 8 MB Cache, SATA150

Hard Drive II

Western Digital WD3200JD

320 GB, 7,200 rpm, 8 MB Cache, SATA150

Networking

Broadcom BCM5751 PCI-Express Gb controller

Graphics Card

Extreme N7800GT/2DHTV (PCI Express)

GeForce 7800GT (400 MHz), 256 MB GDDR3 (500 MHz)

Power Supply

Enermax EG565P-VE, ATX 2.01, 535 WSystem Software & Drivers

OS

Windows XP Professional 5.10.2600, Service Pack 2

DirectX Version

9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)

Platform Drivers

NVIDIA nForce4 6.66 AMD Edition

Graphics Driver

NVIDIA ForceWare 81.85

Test Motherboard : Asus K8N-DL (nForce 4 Pro)