Testbed and Methods
The major goal of our test session was to find out the performance potential of the new AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ processor. In this case it was interesting to compare it against AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ working at the same clock speed, but featuring twice as large L2 cache and against Intel Pentium D 915, which is its main competitor in the same price group.
As for the overclocked to 2.6GHz Athlon 64 X2 3600+, we decided to compare it against 2.6GHz Athlon 64 X2 5000+.
For a more illustrative picture, besides the processors mentioned above, we will also offer you the benchmark results for Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 processor, which is actually not a direct rival to our today抯 hero.
So, this is what we used to build our test platforms:
- CPUs:
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ (Socket AM2, 2.6GHz, 2x512KB L2);
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (Socket AM2, 2.0GHz, 2x512KB L2);
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ (Socket AM2, 2.0GHz, 2x256KB L2);
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 (LGA775, 1.86GHz, 1067MHz FSB, 2MB L2);
- Intel Pentium D 915 (LGA775, 2.8GHz, 800MHz FSB, 2x2MB L2).
- Mainboards:
- ASUS P5W DH Deluxe (LGA775, Intel 975X Express);
- ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe (Socket AM2, NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI).
- Memory: 2048MB DDR2-800 SDRAM (Mushkin XP2-6400PRO, 2 x 1024 MB, DDR2-800, 4-4-4-12-1T).
- Graphics card: PowerColor X1900 XTX 512MB (PCI-E x16).
- HDD: Maxtor MaXLine III 250GB (SATA150).
- OS: Microsoft Windows XP SP2 with DirectX 9.0c.
The tests were performed with the mainboards BIOS setup for maximum performance.
When we overclocked Athlon 64 X2 3600+ to 2.6GHz, the memory worked in DDR2-1040 mode with the timings set to 5-5-5-15-2T.
