High-Flying: AMD Athlon XP 3200+ Squares Off Against Intel P4 3 GHz

Memory Lane: History Of All The AMD And Intel CPUs

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AMD's Recommendations

Prior to the actual launch of the processor, we at THG received a benchmark guide for our test sample that explains to the press the best environment for testing the CPU. Among other things, it contains recommendations for many benchmarks and BIOS settings. It also advises testers to exchange a DLL before starting Sysmark 2002 in order to attain better results in the Media Encoder. We, however, did not make any changes to the benchmarks and stuck to accepted standards.

And one other thing: before installing the operating system, AMD recommends deactivating the APIC mode (Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller) in BIOS in order to boost performance. How does that work? When APIC is deactivated, you only have 15 available IRQs, instead of the standard 23. This puts the brakes on the system, making it go down to the level of Windows 98 and causing hardware conflicts under Windows 2000/ XP.