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Tests of low-end AMD Athlon 64 X2 for Socket AM2Author: Aleksandr ChernoivanDate: 26/09/2006
For a long time, the dual-core wars were going on unnoticed for the medium-class users - all were aware of them, but few could afford to take part in them. Gradually, the situation was changing, the number of people affording that was going up, but the general situation was changing insignificantly. And only after Intel got the redoubtable "mass destruction" Core 2 Duo processors the world started changing again - the less powerful weapon of the former times had to lose in price or sink into oblivion. Today, vehement dual-core wars are spreading in the mainstream and soon in the lower price ranges - it's just here the processors sell in hundreds of thousand pieces. To win battles on this field and thus sell better, it is important to prove superiority: to cost less at equal performance, or on the contrary - to run faster at equal prices, or use cheaper and popular platform, at least be more cost-efficient in terms of power consumption The methods of waging wars for both leaders of the dual-core processor market are similar and at the same time different. They are similar in the total price reduction - sort of a new auction "Who bids the least price?" And they are different in the method of producing the most affordable models. At Intel, they followed the simple way through transforming Pentium D 920 into Pentium D 915 – disable the Intel Virtualization Technology, don't touch anything else and sell cheaper. This is the way models higher than Pentium D 925 and Pentium D 945 were produced, which are in fact Pentium D 930 and Pentium D 950 made cheaper following the same scheme. But what does the competitor offer? AMD who was resting on the laurels for quite a long time was presenting "the most powerful» at not the most friendly price, but Intel's aggressive pricing policies compelled it to revise the prices and roadmaps. First, in the hope of victory, AMD had to substantially reduce the prices for existing and new Socket AM2 processors. But that proved little - it's no good proceeding without a new and even more cheaper and affordable dual-core processor. Armed with the idea «Dual-core AMD processors - to wide public!», the engineers easily made Athlon 64 X2 3800+ into Athlon 64 X2 3600+ through making the L2 cache half as much on each of the cores – the former 512 K were cut down to 256 K. It is highly probable that it was just the way that let revive chips of partly inoperative L2. Today, we'll find out how that affected the performance and at the same time finish with the digression into the capabilities of AMD Socket AM2 that was started with Sempron AM2 and continued in Athlon 64 AM2. And of course we will compare the potentials of all the mentioned value dual-core novelties through preparing grounds for a practical research into the capabilities of Core 2 Duo processors currently selling at full sway. For now, we move on to a closer examination of the specimens of today's review. AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ AM2We received a test specimen of Athlon 64 X2 3600+ packed into an antistatic bag. The low-end model of the dual-core AMD processors is still rarely shipped in the boxed version – more often, it is the OEM version. That is a very popular method of distribution for both assemblers and our retail chain. On the other hand, you don't have to pay for the cooler which may not meet the buyer's requirements and you can choose the cooling system matching your needs – from the very cheap enough to make it run up to a very expensive and efficient to provide maximum overclocking. 
The CPU Athlon 64 X2 3600+ is of a bit unusual marking - ADO3600IAA4CU which can be decoded as follows: ADO – Athlon 64 of TDP up to 65W aimed at workstations (the CPU consumes less power and does not heat up much), 3600 being the CPU rating, I being the package type - 940-pin OµPGA (Socket AM2), A being the core voltage ?1.25-1.35V, A is the maximum admissible temperature of the housing ?55-70°C, 4 – stands for the total L2 cache memory size 512 K (2õ256 K), CU – the Windsor core (the same is also used in the remaining Athlon 64 X2 processors having 2õ512 K L2 cache size). Judging by the marking, this is an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ with half the L2 in each core locked on the hardware level, due to which it has turned cheaper and more efficient in in terms of power consumption. Here is a complete info summary of the processor being tested and the memory GEIL DDR2-800 used in the test, according to the CPU-Z utility. 
Our attempt to overclock Athlon 64 X2 3600+ proved successful enough in view of the fact that the "boxed" cooler was used out of the box for Athlon 64 X2 3800+. Even without raising the voltage, the processor was able running stably at the clock speed 2600 MHz, with the memory running as DDR2-866, but with the Command Rate 2T. We failed to overclock the processor more than that – although the temperature did not go up beyond 60°C, the system operating stability was lost. It's more likely to be the limit for that particular processor specimen. 
The first question we were interested in was: «Is the L2 cache size really important?». To answer this question, is suffices to compare the performance of the "father" and "son" - Athlon 64 X2 3800+ and Athlon 64 X2 3600+. 
The processor has the more customary marking ADA3800IAA5CU, i.e. it is a regular dual-core Athlon 64 X2 aimed at workstations with the overall L2 cache size 1 MB (2õ512K), the TDP up to 89W, and the Windsor core. 
Also, in the test there takes part Athlon 64 X2 3800+ for Socket 939 – using it we will verify what the benefit for Athlon 64 X2 is from acceleration of the memory subsystem and the possibility to use DDR2-400/533/667/800, as well as from migration to Socket AM2. 
Prior to introducing you to the competitor processors, here are the revised tables with the main specifications of new and outdated models AMD Athlon 64 X2. Athlon 64 X2 Socket AM2
Athlon 64 X2 Socket 939
Intel Pentium D 915Intel's processors arrived at our test lab in boxed versions in order to relieve us from search of a suitable cooler (is that really difficult, isn't it?) and make the results, especially those for overclocking, to the average statistical. 
It makes no sense swelling on the package bundle because it hasn't been changed for quite along time - the standard cooler has remained standard, but the processor... 
Intel uses a much simpler notation for its processors – all the major specifications are written on the heat-spreading lid. The processor runs at 2.8 GHz clock speed, offers 4 MB L2 cache size (2 MB per each core), and uses the 800 MHz system bus. PCG 05A – is the power supply mode for the processor the motherboard is to support (13 A of direct current, with the peak current being 16.5 A within at least 10 ms). For more details of the processor and the mode of operation for the memory can be found from the CPU-Z utility. 
As was found out, CPU-Z of version 1.36 was not able to correctly recognize the processor Intel Pentium D 915. To clear away the doubts regarding the processor being tested, we use the sSpec of the processor – SL9DA and move on to www.processorfinder.intel.com. 
The manufacturer's web site tells that it is indeed the Intel Pentium D 915 and provides all of its in-depth details; as we can see - the Intel Virtualization Technology is not supported. Having got the idea of the processor, we tried to overclock it – it is anyway one of the most interesting moments. At first, we were impressed by the result - the system was able to boot up at 3790 MHz. 
But as our first tests revealed, the nominal cooling system was unable to cool the processor whose clock speed was raised by one more gigahertz – the temperature of the core was going up beyond 66°C, followed by the Thermal Throttling. While looking for the clock speed at which the processor would be running stably, we had to push the overclocking down by as much as 300 MHz. The resultant clock speed of the "successfully" overclocked Intel Pentium D 915 amounted to 3500 MHz, but using a more powerful cooling system you could easily raise the overclocking capability of the processor. 
As major contenders for Intel Pentium D 915 we took a couple more processors that appeared this summer. The first one is Intel Pentium D 945 that offers the same set of specifications and technologies but running at 3.4 GHz which after overclocking proved feasible for Intel Pentium D 915 as well. 
The second one, Intel Core 2 Duo E6300, a younger representative of the family that caused upheaval in the industry. 
Prior to the tests, we bring in the revised tables with the specifications of Intel Pentium D lines. Intel Pentium D 9xx LGA775
Intel Pentium D 8xx LGA775
BenchmarkingFor running the tests, we selected a rather extensive kit of processors, so now we can answer not only the question 'Which one is faster?' but a few at a time:
To answer these questions, we assembled three test configurations. Test configuration for AMD Socket 939:
Test configuration for AMD Socket AM2:
Test configuration for Intel LGA775:
To start with, let's see how the processors respond to the change of operating speed of the memory subsystem. We start with AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ in combination with DDR2-400/533/667/800. 
Despite that Futuremark PCMark’05 has proved practically indifferent to memory performance , the other benchmarking suites showed a performance boost as high as 35% due to transition from DDR2-400 to DDR2-800, that is, in most ways it doesn't make sense saving on memory modules. And what about Intel Pentium D 915? Unfortunately, ASUS P5B Deluxe/Wi-Fi-AP does not allow for operating with DDR2-400 if the system bus is higher than 533 MHz. We also had no DDR2-1066 available, but the missing results can be calculated approximately using those already produced. 
Based on the produced results, we can conclude that for Intel Pentium D fast memory modules is of less importance than for AMD Athlon 64 X2. Of course, in this case much depends on the chipset, motherboard and BIOS, as well as memory latency timings, but we believe it makes no sense to buy expensive DDR2-800/1066 memory with low timings for these purposes. The bottleneck of these systems is the bus running at 800 MHz. Having sorted out with the memory requirements of systems being tested, we now move on to comparing the CPU performances in various tasks. We start with the synthetic benchmarks.. 
SiSoftware Sandra 2007 SP1 equates the performance of Athlon 64 X2 3600+ and Athlon 64 X2 3800+, and despite the different cache memory sizes the benchmarking suite shows a minor lag of Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Socket AM2 behind the Socket 939 at arithmetics with higher memory operating speed; it shows excellent performance of Athlon 64 X2 3600+, especially in the overclocked state, in comparison with both Intel Pentium D 915 and even Intel Core 2 Duo E6300. 
Futuremark PCMark’05 has long been a matter of complaints that it is biased towards processors of higher clock speeds – which we could observe in the CPU test. Athlon 64 X2 3600+ and Athlon 64 X2 3800+ are everywhere on par, except the graphics tests. Intel Pentium D 915 rehabilitates mainly due to the encoding tasks, but anyway lags well behind at graphics. We now move on to practical tests of data compression (archiving a folder containing programs and documents of 1 GB total size), as well as audio encoding (540 MB *.wav into *.mp3) and vide encoding (a 74 MB *.mpeg movie into *.avi). Here the faster is the better. 
WinRar 3.60, unlike 7-ZIP 4.42, offers better optimization for multithreaded compression on dual-core processors, which is well seen by the results. On the whole, we finally managed to find tasks where Athlon 64 X2 3600+ lags behind because of the reduced cache, and Athlon 64 X2 3800+ demonstrates a small performance boost due to the faster memory operation. Media encoding is still a "soap-box" for Intel processors, especially while compressing audio with LAME codec, but overclocking Athlon 64 X2 3600+ changes the situation and it is ready to compete even against Intel Core 2 Duo E6300, whereas Intel Pentium D 915 is no match for it at that. 
The memory speed is important for fast operation in CAD/CAM suites, so Socket AM2 processors win at that over Socket 939 even if the L2 cache .size is smaller. But here Intel Pentium D 915 is already a rather serious competitor which after overclocking catches up with almost Intel Core 2 Duo E6300. 
Judging by the results of gaming benchmarks by Futuremark, we can see some dependence of AMD CPU performance on the L2 cache size - there is almost no lag. But the DDR2 memory has shown not as much use as we expected. That does not prevent Athlon 64 X2 3600+ from being faster than Intel Pentium D 915 in new versions of the package. 
Quake 3, sensitive to the operation speed of the memory controller, shows interesting results. All the Intel processors have proved faster at that. The DDR2 with ó AMD did not hold water. But modern and resource-intensive games will show a bit different result… 
Games demonstrate some minor lag of Athlon 64 X2 3600+ behind Athlon 64 X2 3800+, but on the other hand we see some small performance boost for Socket AM2 processors. Intel Pentium D 915 is not as good a performer as in multimedia. And only the much greater cache size saved it from lagging well behind Athlon 64 X2 3600+ . Final WordsLet's try summarizing all the answers to the questions we posed in the review. AMD has done a pretty successful job of the dual-core Athlon 64 X2 3600+ which almost doesn't lag behind Athlon 64 X2 3800+ and in almost all the tasks runs faster than Intel Pentium D 915 despite the reduced L2 cache size and with no practical use from DDR2 memory. The most affordable dual-core Intel processor proved faster in only a few tasks, which is also good, so it makes no sense to disregard it. In the long run, it is the price and priority of tasks to be done will matter most to the thrifty user, unless the user is not into overclocking. After all, we note that even Athlon 64 X2 3600+ if overclocked can yield a performance comparable to Intel Core 2 Duo E6300, and the costs may prove even smaller in terms of the price of processors and motherboards. Those who are not short for funds will not find anything topical from the tests we ran – with a good motherboard they will overclock Intel Core 2 Duo to a performance level unattainable to competitors, but the cheap-rate processors are not meant for such buyers. We appreciate LLC PF "Servis" (Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine) for the processors and other hardware presented for tests.
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