Opteron Chipset Comparison
Omega65
Philadelphia, Pa
GamePC: <a href="http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=amd64platforms&page=1&MSCSProfile=95385A1F52DEA1A229D5B37542054464DC3FF53EB2C2612416CC871D9A0F22223CEA34186021605F9D85D9ED58CF0D0B5A56CE0BFF97780FE7291E2AC10ACC0455B698901CD5CAF42F4D6E10F376E88093CA933315CE708C9954457FA78EABC5BB343149420BBFC16393A994F22F19DF83453630C47626CCB8AFD753C46E6A4931C8161B954A41C3" target=_blank>The First AMD64 Platforms Compared : AMD(8000), nVidia (NForce3 150), and VIA (K8T800)</a>
Today at GamePC, we'll be looking at the first two volume-production Athlon64 chipsets, the nForce3 150 from nVidia and the K8T800 from VIA, and we'll compare them to the current crop of Athlon 64FX / Opteron chipsets on the market as well. We'll also take a look at some of the first generation motherboard platforms which are using these chipsets. Hopefully we can make that motherboard pairing choice for your shiny new Athlon64 processor a little bit easier. We will also compare these two Athlon64 chips to similarly configured Opteron platforms running at the same 2.0 GHz clock rate, in order to see not only performance differences between the chipsets, but how the Opteron's dual channel DDR memory interface affects performance.
Today at GamePC, we'll be looking at the first two volume-production Athlon64 chipsets, the nForce3 150 from nVidia and the K8T800 from VIA, and we'll compare them to the current crop of Athlon 64FX / Opteron chipsets on the market as well. We'll also take a look at some of the first generation motherboard platforms which are using these chipsets. Hopefully we can make that motherboard pairing choice for your shiny new Athlon64 processor a little bit easier. We will also compare these two Athlon64 chips to similarly configured Opteron platforms running at the same 2.0 GHz clock rate, in order to see not only performance differences between the chipsets, but how the Opteron's dual channel DDR memory interface affects performance.
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The Final Word
Well, those benchmarks weren’t as exciting as we would have hoped they would be. Despite the different CPU names, memory configurations, and HyperTransport links, single CPU systems based on the Athlon64 and Opteron processors will perform almost exactly the same. Even with different memory clock speeds and configurations, performance differences were negligible.
So what does this tell us? Well, since AMD has taken control of the memory controllers, they have basically taken away any major performance differences between chipsets as well. As we've seen here, no matter what application or game we ran on the various chipsets, there was no more than a 5% variance in real world performance between the chipsets, which can be accounted for either by the motherboard timings or window of error in our benchmarks. Whatever the case is, we did not see any actual, real, honest to god difference when watching these benchmarks run between the motherboards.
someone needs to be hit by