The Ultimate in Performance, the AMD Athlon XP 2700 !
Written: Dec 21 '02 (Updated Feb 23 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Fast, Fast, Fast! New 333 MHz FSB!
Cons: None
The Bottom Line: The AMD Athlon XP 2700 has the speed and performance to meet all your game and application needs!
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| surferdude7's Full Review: AMD Athlon XP 2700+, 2.17 GHz (axp2700oem) OEM / U... |
AMD in the last couple of months have come out with the Athlon XP 2700 and 2800. This review is on the 2700 which has been available for about a month now to the general public, the 2800 is still hard to find but I suspect it will be readily available soon. This review is also on the OEM processor, which comes with a one-year warranty. The retail version hasn’t hit the street yet but should come out soon, the retail version has a three-year warranty with a supplied cooling fan. The 2700 XP processor is made to get the best use out of Windows XP.
New
New from AMD is the 333 MHz Front Side Bus, (FSB) which the original Athlon XP 2600 didn’t have but the newer ones do.
AMD has for a long time now offered only processors with a Front Side Bus speed of 200 MHz or 266 MHz, so the new speed of 333MHz is about a 25% improvement in speed.
The 2700
AMD rates their chips differently than Intel.
Actually the 2700 is only a 2.17 GHz processor but runs a 2.7 GB Memory Bandwidth.
How does this compare with and Intel chip running at about 2700 MHz? In most tests done by various different places the AMD chip will run as good as the Intel chip and in some cases it kicks it’s as#!
QuantiSpeed Architecture
QuantiSpeed Architecture for rapid execution of applications to enhance the performance of them.
AMD uses a 72-entry instruction control unit, multiple parallel x86 instruction decoders, advanced hardware data prefetch, advanced dynamic branch prediction with exclusive and speculative translation look-aside buffers.
For high performance the have 9 issue superpipelined, superscalar x86 processor microarchitecture. Three out-of-order, superscalar, pipelined integer units, fully pipelined floating point execution units and pipelined address calculation units.
3DNow!
3Dnow has been a big hit for the Athlon processors with 21 original instructions, with the 2700 having an extra 19 instructions.
The nineteen extra instructions have improved integer math calculations for speech and video encoding. Plus it has improved data movement for Internet plug-ins and other streaming applications. Plus more for improved MP3 applications, Digital Dolby sound and more.
The 2700
The AMD Athlon XP 2700 is made in Dresden, Germany. It is a 0.13-micron processor with approximately 37.6 million transistors.
It uses 64K instruction and 64K data cache for a total of 128K L1 cache with 256K of integrated L2 for a total of 384K cache on the processor.
My Application
The OEM processor comes with no cooling fans so you will have to buy one to keep it from overheating. The fans are not to bad in price many for less than $20 and some for more. There are other cooling devices available but unless you plan on Overclocking it will not be necessary.
The two big improvements is the faster speed of the 2700 and the 333MHz FSB. To get the most out of the processor you need a motherboard made for the new performance features of the 2700. I decided to go with the Asus A7N8X Motherboard because it supported the 333MHz FSB, up to a 2800 processor and the extra boost of the dual DDR 400 MHz memory.
Installation of the processor and cooling fan is easy with this motherboard, just place it in the socket and pull down the level on the socket to lock it in place. The cooling fan snaps on top of the processor.
My final results are it is a fast and very smooth running processor. I have tried running Windows XP in the past and always ended up putting Windows ME back on. With this motherboard and processor, Windows XP runs rather smoothly without any of the problems I had in the past.
You can Overclock it but I haven’t tried it because the performance for now it excellent.
~~~One Note~~~
The AMD Athlon XP 2700 is suppose to show a plus sign behind it, but no matter what I have tried, Epinions is set up to delete it automatically so there is no plus sign in my review!
Here other processor and motherboard reviews
AMD Athlon XP 2600 Retail
AMD Athlon XP 2100
Asus A7N8X Motherboard
EPoX EP-8K7A Socket A ATX Motherboard
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Recommended:
Yes
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surferdude7
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