CPU Scaling Analysis, Part 1: AMD Athlon
Current Athlon Prices
The following table contains the current average Athlon prices (ascertained over www.pricewatch.com).
| Athlon 800 | $ 100 |
| Athlon 900 | $ 125 |
| Athlon 1000 | $ 170 |
| Athlon-C 1000 | $ 210 |
| Athlon 1100 | $ 195 |
| Athlon-C 1133 | $ 220 |
| Athlon-C 1200 | $ 240 |
| Athlon 1200 | $ 220 |
The currently 'slowest' models are priced very attractively, which makes them much more interesting than most Pentium III models between 800 and 933 MHz. As you could read in previous articles (check the Keyword Index or CPU Guide ), the Athlon Thunderbird outperforms Intel's Pentium III due to its clock speed advantage. The AMD CPU is even able to beat Intel's Pentium 4. Please read Tom's Power Box article where he overclocked an Athlon-C to amazing 1.6 GHz!
Test Setup
| Test System | |
|---|---|
| CPU | AMD Athlon 800, 900, 1000, 1100, 1200 MHzAMD Athlon-C 1000, 1133, 1200 MHz |
| Motherboard | Asus A7V133, Rev. 1.02.BIOS 1003T |
| RAM | 128 MB PC133 SDRAM, 7ns (Wichmann Workx) CL2 |
| Hard Disk | IBM DeskStar 75 GXP, DTLA307030, 7200 rpm |
| Graphics Card | nVIDIA GeForce 2 Ultra64 MB DDR-SDRAM (4 ns) |
| Operating System | Windows 98 SE 4.10.2222 AWindows 2000 Professional 5.00.2195 SP1 |
| Benchmarks and Setup | |
| Office Applications Benchmark | BAPCo SYSmark2000 |
| OpenGL Benchmarks | Quake III ArenaRetail Versioncommand line = +set cd_nocd 1 +set s_initsound 0Graphics detail set to 'Normal', 640x480x16Benchmark using 'Q3DEMO1'SPECviewperf 6.1.2 Full Run |
| Direct3D Game Benchmark | Mercedes Benz Truck RacingDefault Direct 3D Settings |
| Screen Resolution | 1024x768x85, 16 Bit1280x1024x75, 16 Bit for SPECviewperf 6.1.2 |
| DirectX Version | 8.0a |
As I wanted to show the difference between the various processor speeds, I used a fast graphics card, NVIDIA's GeForce 2 Ultra. It is one of the fastest 3D boards available, but still the bottleneck in some of the benchmarks.
You should be quite familiar with the rest of the test setup: IBM's DTLA drive, Asus A7V133 and 128 MB brand SDRAM by Wichmann Workx Germany.
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Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.