Cpu Reviews

AMD Athlon 1.4GHz Review
Part 1: The Hardware & Game Benchmarks
by William Henning
Editor, CPUReview
Copyright June 3, 2001; embargoed until June 6
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Introduction
A little while ago FedEx delivered a small box from AMD You may well ask, what was in it?

I won’t keep you in suspense this time - it was a new 1.4GHz Athlon processor!

Benchmark Programs Used
I wanted to get a good feel for the performance of the Athlon. I ran a large number of popular benchmarks, whose results are reported in this review. Please note, most of these benchmarks are what I’ve been running for my other reviews, so you can compare the results shown in the different reviews (and articles) on my site.

All benchmarks are run with VSync disabled; current systems and high end video cards are so fast that you cannot judge performance if you leave VSync on - all systems would score the same!

Benchmarks used in Part 1:

* Turok demo
* Incoming demo
* Forsaken demo
* Quake 2

Why those benchmarks? While some of them are getting a bit long in the tooth (with the obvious exception of Quake III), they are the benchmarks I’ve been using all along - which means that you can compare the results between different reviews at this site. I suspect I will be adding some more up to date games in the near future.

Part 2 of this review will present more synthetic benchmark results using:

* MemTach v0.80A (CPUReview’s own memory benchmark)
* Final Reality benchmark
* 3DMarks 2000
* RC5-64 client
* POV-Ray
* Sandra 2000 Standard

System Description
AMD did a nice job of configuring their demonstration system:

* Gigabyte GA-7DX motherboard (AMD 761 based, w/audio)
* Athlon 1.4GHz CPU (yes, 1,400MHz - my first computer was a 1.79MHz Atari 400!)
* 2x 128Mb PC2100 DDR modules (Hyundai)
* IBM DTLA-307020 30.7Gb UDMA100 hd
* Pioneer 16x DVD-ROM
* Allied Telesyn AT-2700TX 10/100 NIC (AMD PCnet-Fast+ based)
* Leadtek 64Mb GeForce 2 Ultra (presumably DDR)
* Keytronics 104-key keyboard
* Microsoft Intellimouse
* ATX mid tower case
* 350W ATX power supply
* Windows ME
* DirectX8

The Motherboard
In my experience, Gigabyte has always built very reliable boards; and they appear to have done their usual good job on the GA-7DX.

Gigabyte 7DX motherboard     The 7DX is based on the AMD 761 northbridge with a VIA 82C686B southbridge, and it supports a good set of standard features:

* 1 AGP 4x / 5 PCI / 1 AMR slots
* 2 x UDMA100 EIDE channels
* 1 fd / 2 serial / 1 parallel / 4 USB ports
* Creative CT5880 and AC’97 on-board sound
* two DDR dimm sockets supporting a maximum of 4Gb

The Processor
The 1.4GHz Athlon is the top of the line processor currently offered by AMD:

1. The Athlon has a very advanced processor core

2. 128Kb of L1 cache and 256Kb of L2 cache running at full processor speed

3. The processors front side bus effectively runs at 266MHz (133MHz double data rate) allowing for a theoretical peak of 2.1 giga bytes per second bandwidth between the CPU and the rest of the system