AMD Athlon - a star is born

It was a strange situation when the first benchmark results of the AMD Athlon were available. It was the first time that anyone was able to push Intel away from the performance lead. I talk about overall performance, not those virgin Word & Co integer benchmarks where K6-2/3 were very strong before, but in the game relevant FPU (Floating Point) part.

Until now AMD processors where always behind intel Celeron and Pentium II/III in modern 3D games. With Athlon the situation changed completely - independent if 3DNow! is used or not: The Athlon is the fastest gamer CPU available at the moment. But itīs playing in the upper Pentium III price class. If want to pay on Celeron level you wonīt be happy with Athlon.

The testsystem

We got hands on a complete reference system from AMD. A 600MHz Athlon is working on an AMD 'Fester' reference mainboard using the Irongate chipset with 100 MHz FSB (Frontside Bus). It is equipped with a single 128MB 7ns SDRAM DIMM. A 32MB Diamond Viper V770 Ultra with TNT2 is responsibel for graphics output. AMD installed Win98SE and NT4 on seperate harddisks (only W98 was tested here...we talk about gaming performance). Soundcard is a Creative Soundblaster Live! Value. Other components are an AMD own PCI network card and a DVD drive. A powerfull 300W power supply is used in the case. All I can say: I didīnt want to send it back anymore.... :-)

I didīnt have an Intel 600MHz CPU available to make a direct comparsion between Pentium III and Athlon. So this article takes care on the question: What performance gain can you expect when you upgrade to an Athlon and where can you use the better performance? (Youīll see that the graphic card becomes the bottleneck in these performance regions)

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Copyright: RIVA Station 1999 - Lars Weinand
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