![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Wednesday, May 14, 2003
- Author:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
AMD 3200+ / VIA KT600 / NV Ultra 400
The down and dirty on AMD's newest AthlonXP, VIA's newest chipset, and NVIDIA's newest chipset. Head to head to head.
Test Systems
VIA Reference Mainboard (KT600) - AMD AthlonXP 3200+ 2.2GHz CPU (clocked at 11x200), 2 x 256MB Corsair XMS3200 @ SCDDR400 2-2-2 - ATI Radeon 9700 Pro w/ ATI Catalyst 2.3 drivers - 40 GB Maxtor ATA133 HDD - Allied 400w PSU - WindowsXP w/SP1
Asus A7N8X (nForce2 Ultra 400) - AMD AthlonXP 3200+ 2.2GHz CPU (clocked at 11x200), 2 x 256MB Corsair XMS3200 @ DCDDR400 2-2-2 - ATI Radeon 9700 Pro w/ ATI Catalyst 2.3 drivers - 40 GB Maxtor ATA133 HDD - Allied 400w PSU - WindowsXP w/SP1
ABIT IC7-G (i875P) - Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHz CPU (clocked at 15x200), 2 x 256MB Corsair XMS3200 @ DCDDR400 2-2-2 - ATI Radeon 9700 Pro w/ ATI Catalyst 2.3 drivers - 40 GB Maxtor ATA133 HDD - Allied 400w PSU - WindowsXP w/SP1
SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth Benchmark
(This graph has been changed and should reflect a value of "4777" for the Intel board. If you are seeing otherwise, your image will soon be updated by our site engine. When putting together the graph this morning I used our 1GHz FSB numbers instead of the stock 800MHz FSB scores as is correct.)
I thought we would lead with this benchmark as it is probably the single most important graph we can publish in this review. I would suspect that many enthusiasts would be surprised to see VIA KT600 pull ahead of the NF2 and its dual channel memory. As noted on the front page, this is the biggest improvement we have seen in any of these three products. VIA engineers have had their noses to the grindstone in order to make this a reality. Certainly makes you wonder if we could get a bit closer to that 3.2GB/sec mark if we had "VIA KT602" with DCDDR support.
As is to be expected, the Intel Canterwood system cleans house in this synthetic memory bandwidth benchmark. The Pentium 4 affords the memory a "Quad Pumped Bus" that is simply two times wider than the Athlon's.
Application Benchmarks
ZD Business Winstone
Business Winstone has long been an AMD staple as once again shown above. Of course the impressive number is the VIA KT600 standing strong along side the NF2.
While we see it mixed up a tad bit more in this graphing, the difference between the results of the AMD platforms is still well within the margin of error.
ZD Content Creation Winstone
Our CC Winstone 2002 results might surprise you a bit, but we did have some difficulties testing. Keeping in mind that our KT600 board was a reference board from VIA, and hot off the press so to speak, we had some stability problems with this particular benchmark. We did finally squeeze out a single benchmark to at least give us a value to graph but experience tells me that the number is a good bit low. CCWinstone suites need to make a few practice runs on WindowsXP in order to reach a stable score. So all in all, this benchmark I would take with a grain of salt because I suspect the KT600 would have done better given better circumstances.
Our Intel system's combination of HyperThreading, FSB, Memory bus, and SSEII show off on this set of benchmarks. On this set of benchmarks, we did not have stability issues as we did the last. We again see the numbers return to near mirror images of each other on the AMD system with the 3200+.
dBpowerAMP Music Converter
Converting Wav files to MP3 format is extremely CPU intensive as it pinpoints on clock cycle usage. You notice the faster MHz Intel Pentium 4 make quick work of our slower clocked AMD CPUs. Again our KT600 and NF2 show to not be holding the CPU back in any way.