CPU Scaling Analysis, Part 1: AMD Athlon

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Current Athlon Prices

The following table contains the current average Athlon prices (ascertained over www.pricewatch.com).

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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

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Test System
CPUAMD Athlon 800, 900, 1000, 1100, 1200 MHzAMD Athlon-C 1000, 1133, 1200 MHz
MotherboardAsus A7V133, Rev. 1.02.BIOS 1003T
RAM128 MB PC133 SDRAM, 7ns (Wichmann Workx) CL2
Hard DiskIBM DeskStar 75 GXP, DTLA307030, 7200 rpm
Graphics CardnVIDIA GeForce 2 Ultra64 MB DDR-SDRAM (4 ns)
Operating SystemWindows 98 SE 4.10.2222 AWindows 2000 Professional 5.00.2195 SP1
Benchmarks and Setup
Office Applications BenchmarkBAPCo SYSmark2000
OpenGL BenchmarksQuake 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 BenchmarkMercedes Benz Truck RacingDefault Direct 3D Settings
Screen Resolution1024x768x85, 16 Bit1280x1024x75, 16 Bit for SPECviewperf 6.1.2
DirectX Version8.0a

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.