For transmitting a high volume of I/O traffic in your computer, I have learned that only AMD processors can do the job on a small budget.  As a result, I choose the AMD Athlon 64 4000+ 2400Mhz Socket 939 processor as the heart of my new video surveillance system.  The HyperTransport memory speed and easy overclocking of the AMD 4000+ also give me the flexibility to increase the speed as demand rises.  What will result in this AMD vs Intel grudge match?  Read on to find out!

Installing An AMD Athlon Socket 939 Processor
You should know that installing an AMD Socket 939 processor is a little different because of the large processor die.  You are going to want to spread the thermal compound evenly across the entire metal surface of the die. 

Operating Temperature Of AMD Athlon ADA4000DAA5BN
While running benchmarks, I got a high value of 125 degrees Fahrenheit and a low of 100 degrees Fahrenheit in a temperature controlled server room set at 70 degrees Fahrenheit.  The relatively large 90nm die of this processor can be attributed to the increase in operating temperature.   The thermal output does not become a problem until you start overclocking this AMD processor though.  When the AMD Athlon 4000+ is at 2.62Ghz, I hit a peak of 143 degrees Fahrenheit and did not dare go any further with my stock cooling setup.

HyperTransport Feature In This AMD Processor
The AMD Athlon 64 4000+ utilizes an integrated memory controller to increase the speed of the memory in your computer.  Intel processors of the Socket 478 and Socket 775 generation did not have this feature which caused them to perform poorly in benchmark comparisons.  In fact, this is one of the reasons why the relatively low clock frequency of this processor still yields faster computation times in memory intensive applications like SuperPi.  HyperTransport could be called the brand name or face of this integrated memory controller technology.  The high speed, point to point links were designed to utilize the integrated CPU memory controller as a communications bus on the motherboard.  The point to point connections vary in size as measured by the number of links in an interconnect.  The higher the number of links in a single internconnect, the higher the bandwidth possible. 

In short, this is why I choose AMD processors for use in desktop video surveillance solutions.  The PCI bus can communicate directly with a memory controller that operates at the same frequency as the processor.  Reducing the latency (delay incurred while transmitting data between two points) of the PCI bus means higher recording framerates. 

Overclocking The Athlon 64
Using just an air cooled heatsink and the ASUS A8N-SLI Premium motherboard, I was able to get the ADA4000DAA5BN processor to run at a peak clock frequency of  2620Mhz  with the front side bus set to 218Mhz. While I did not take this processor to its extreme limits, I was certainly able to find some more speed by just increasing the front side bus frequency.  The benchmarks below all show a favorable result from the overclocking as well.  You can expect this on all AMD Athlon 64 processors due to the fact that you are also overclocking the memory bus when you make any changes to processor speed.

Benchmarking The AMD Athlon 64 4000+, 2.4 GHz Processor
My test machine was an ASUS A8N-SLI with a fully populated memory bank with Hypertransport multiplier set to maximum.  A full memory bank offers 128Bit memory data width which will gave me a boost to performance for these benchmarks.  I completed my test system by installing a Seagate Barracuda LP (ST32000542AS) 2 TB SATA II Hard Drive to store the streaming video and a Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST3160318AS - 160 GB - 7200 rpm - 3.5 - Internal SATA II Hard Drive as the primary boot drive to keep the operating system paging requests isolated.

Super Pi
Super Pi V1.1 is an application that extrapolates the specified digits of PI into a text file.  Since the task is both processor and file system intensive it can give you an idea of how fast your cpu is.  Processors with large on-die cache sizes and high bus speeds tend to do better in this benchmark.  The problem is the calculation is single threaded in this version so you only see the performance of one processor.  The test results are quite impressive for this processor.  The Intel Core 2 Duo E8600 3.33Ghz processor was only able to do complete this benchmark in 13 seconds.  Consider this your first sign that even though this is a nice processor, your gaming performance will be subpar due to a lack of numerical crunching power. 

Yet my last statement was misleading because I was comparing the much newer Intel E8600 to this one.  For a fair comparison, look at the Intel Xeon 3.4Ghz 2Mb of Cache processor.  You would think that at 1,000Mhz higher clock frequency, the Xeon would trump the AMD but we are both wrong.  Instead, the Xeon could only finish the calculation in 39 seconds!  Even with server grade technology, the Xeon does not have the memory bandwidth to compete with the AMD HyperTransport.

Here are the results of three runs at 1,000,000 digits of PI at 2.4Ghz:
#1;  36 seconds
#2;  36 seconds

Here are the results of three runs at 1,000,000 digits of PI at 2.62Ghz:
#1;   33 seconds
#2;   33 seconds

BOINC Manager
The benchmark is designed to stress every available thread on your computer to see how many computations per second it can perform.  With the results, the Boinc Manager automatically assigns distributed computing projects to your processors.  The benchmark has been improved by scholars at academic institutions over the period of several years and is now a very reliable metric of modern computing performance.  The Intel Celeron 356 3.33Ghz processor achieved 1725 floating point MIPS (Whetstone) per cpu, 2735 integer MIPS (Dhrystone) per cpu.  Many people would rather have seen a comparison to the AMD Sempron processors but yet again, I wanted to highlight the difference between a newer product from Intel to this one.  You simply cannot discount the effect memory speed has on a computer’s ability to perform.

Here the results of three runs at 2.4Ghz:
#1;  2456 floating point MIPS (Whetstone) per cpu, 4547 integer MIPS (Dhrystone) per cpu
#2;  2478 floating point MIPS (Whetstone) per cpu, 4556 integer MIPS (Dhrystone) per cpu

Here the results of three runs at 2.62Ghz:
#1;  2647 floating point MIPS (Whetstone) per cpu, 4901 integer MIPS (Dhrystone) per cpu
#2;  2632 floating point MIPS (Whetstone) per cpu, 4891 integer MIPS (Dhrystone) per cpu

POV-Ray 3.7 Beta
A new version of the freeware 3D animation utility has been released that offers SSE2 enhanced processing extensions.  POV –Ray stresses the floating point unit and memory bandwidth of the processor to render stunning 2D images.  The results were not particularly good because we are testing with a single core computer processing unit.  Both of my mighty Intel Xeon 3.4Ghz processors were able to complete this test in 18 minutes 4 seconds.  Yet that was with four logical processors!

Using the benchmark.pov file at 512x384 NO AA, I ran the following traces at 2.4Ghz:
#1;  26 minutes 2 seconds
#2;  26 minutes 3 seconds

Using the benchmark.pov file at 512x384 NO AA, I ran the following traces at 2.62Ghz:
#1;  24 minutes 20 seconds
#2;  24 minutes 19 seconds

MCS Benchmark 2008 V6.30
The MCS CPU Benchmark 2008 will test the entire system to give you an overall score based on CPU and file system performance.  I used an older version of this software because it has been used on a wide variety of processors for my other reviews.  The Intel Celeron 356 3.33Ghz Socket 775 processor can only achieve a score of 4021 at stock speeds and 4785 at 4.2Ghz.

Here are the results of two runs at 2.4Ghz:
#1;  4922
#2;  4936

Here are the results of two runs at 2.62Ghz:
#1;  5347
#2;  5364

Specifications
Manufacturer:  AMD
Model:  Athlon 64
Sequence:  4000+
Clock Frequency:  2400 Mhz
Die Manufacturing Size:  90nm
CPU Cores:  1 physical cpu
Level 1 Cache:  128Kb
Level 2 Cache:  1 Mb 16 way associative cache
Instruction Sets:  MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3
Reference Part Numbers:  ADA4000DKA5CF, ADA4000CFBOX

Summary
At my home, I keep this AMD Athlon 64 4000+ busy recording video 24/7.  The system is very stable with no problems over the past three months.  I have seen similar systems fail because their Intel Socket 478 processor was not able to keep up with the file system demands.  In this respect, the AMD HyperTransport technology is the perfect choice for my limited needs.

I am still undecided about using this processor in any system other than a web browsing or video recording machine.  Using Windows XP Professional SP2 with just one physical cpu core is not the best experience for people who want to play video games or stream high-definition video from YouTube to their Samsung PN63B550 63 inch HDTV TV.    With a good SLI x16 video card on the ASUS A8N-SLI motherboard, I still got a choppy frame rate at 1080P resolution.  In conclusion, I recommend buying an AMD Athlon-64 X2 4400+ processor instead for gaming.

In all I give the AMD Athlon 64 4000+, 2.4 GHz Processor one thumb up and one thumb down.

Recommended: Yes