Are you eXPerienced?

Author : Martyn Date : 9th October 2001

3DVelocity would like to thank AMD and especially Theresa Zimmer for their help and courtesy in providing this processor for review.

 

 

All the new features and names will essentially mean nothing if the XP can't perform in today's applications and games. Lets run the XP through the usual benchmarks to asses it's value, how will it perform? I've a feeling you may already know...

 

Part Seven: The Test Setup.

(The CPU in question) AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1530MHz)
Giga-byte GA-7DX DDR Motherboard (using latest BIOS dated 11/09/01)
256MB unbranded Micron 2100 DDR Ram Cas 2
ATI 64MB Radeon VIVO (Retail)
AMD Approved 300w Power Supply
45GB IBM 75gxp ATA 100 Hard drive
Cyberdrive 16x12x40 CDR/W
Coolermaster AMD Approved HSF
Windows 98SE OS.

 

Part Eight: 3D Performance

As I mentioned briefly in the recent 1.33GHz review, Athlon / Duron's have really become the gamer's choice of late providing the hardened gamer with a price to performance ratio never before seen. To evaluate the performance of this new CPU we ran it through the popular benchmarking tool from MadOnion.com, 3DMark 2001. This would surely assess the D3D performance, for Open GL based testing Id's Quake three arena was employed.

3DMark 2001 (16bit Colour depth)

 

3DMark 2001 (32bit Colour depth)

3DMark 2001 32bit	640 x 480	800 x 600	1024 x 768	1280 x 1024	1600 x 1200
Athlon XP 1800+	4914	4349	3528	2638	2136

(Results expressed in '3DMarks')

(Interesting fact)

I was surprised to see the program recognize the CPU by its code name. It seems Madonion knew of the CPU's existence for some time...

Don't worry, I know a lot of people don't have huge budgets to spend on every new piece of hardware. It would have been tempting to utilize a Geforce 3 based card for these benchies however, I expect you will see a lot of scores that use these very quick cards soon. With that in mind I tried to show the performance increases for the 'normal' user to by opting to show you the now decidedly midrange 64meg Radeon scores. As one would have anticipated they were excellent. Although it's arguable that the scores are based on upping the frequency alone, we can still see what a great performer this CPU really is. I noticed a nice increase in framerate over the 1.33GHz chip we recently tested and the higher framerates seemed much more consistent with this CPU.

As, no doubt, you would have guessed, the Athlon XP 1800+ will certainly not disappoint the hardened gamer. Lets move on to see if it's performance is also as good in the Open GL based Quake 3 Arena...

 

Page Five: 3D Performance [2]
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