Great Chip
Written: Feb 03 '04 (Updated Mar 13 '05)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great performance, easy installation.
Cons: Heat production, limited availability in prebuilt systems.
The Bottom Line: Great value for the processor dollar.
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| digitaldoc's Full Review: AMD Athlon™ XP 2800+, 2.8 GHz (AXDA2800BOX) Reta... |
The Athlon XP 2800+ chip may represent the best value today for the user who does NOT intend to overclock their processor (the 2500+ is the best for overclocking among the Athlon XP's). I bought this chip for a small form factor PC I built from Shuttle (SN41G2)
"http://www.epinions.com/content_138039561860"
When I figured out it was half the price of a Pentium 4, the deal was a good as made.
First of all, some basic stats on the chip are its bus speed is 2086 MHz (verified by CPUID), and its bus speed is 333 (166 x 2). It has 128 kb of L1 cache, and 512 kb of L2 cache, is built on the 0.13 micron process, has 53.9 million transistors, and fits in a socket A motherboard.
Among the Athlon XP processors, it fits into the "Barton" family, that are available in speeds of 2500+, 2800+, 3000+, and 3200+. The Bartons replaced the "Thoroughbreds" and received a doubling of their L2 cache from 256 to 512 kb.
I bought the retail package which includes the heatsink and fan. A bare proceesor is also available, but it only has a one year warranty instead of the retail boxes 3 year warranty. The box included a setup poster. The processor fit easily into the motherboard in a "Socket A" without any problem. The box does NOT include thermal grease which is essential to transfer the heat from the cpu to the heatsink so the processor does not melt. One should never fire up the cpu without the grease, heatsink and fan in place.
The chip runs at a slower clock speed than the equivalent Pentium 4 chip, a Northwood 2.8 GHz processor. One of the secrets to how the Athlon XP can compete is the cache. Cache is the immediate memory to the processor, in fact it is on board the actual processor in these modern chips. Data is fed to the chip via first the L1 cache, then the L2 cache, and then the system RAM. Being on board the chip, and moving at the clock speed means that going to the cache rather than the RAM for data speeds things up quite a bit. The Athlon XP has 128 kb of L1 cache versus 20 kb of L1 cache of the Pentium 4 processor. The L2 cache is the same at 512 kb. However, in general, L1 cache is the more important one because the chip turns to it first (remember the original celerons with no L1 cache?).
Also, the chip features Quantispeed architecture. Some of the features of this include that the chip can decode 3 x86 instructions per clock cycle, rather than the one of the Pentium 4 chip. Also, the chip can deliver four 32-bit floating point calculations per clock cycle. Also, the chip has 3DNow! Professional technology. This features all the instructions of 3DNow! that debuted in the original K6-2 processor. Add to that, the Enhanced 3DNow! instructions of the Athlon processor that included the MMX extensions, and you get 3DNow! Professional which includes the complete SSE extensions. This also ensures that the chip is completely compatible with any software you throw at it.
While all of this is theoretically very nice, how does the chip really perform. I used CPU Bench. This is a very small program that tests only the chip in floating point operations. I personally ran it on the following computers with the following results:
Cyrix Media GX 180 MHz---------> 16
Pentium 200 MMX----------------> 53
AMD K6 233---------------------> 91
AMD K6-2 475 MHz---------------> 212
Pentium 4 1.6 GHz--------------> 253
Pentium 4 2.4 GHZ--------------> 377
AMD Athlon XP 2800+------------> 697
As you can see, it is by far the fastest chip I have tested. I was hoping for a score of around 500, I was absolutely amazed at a score that high, it completely exceeded my expectations. Unfortunately, I don't have access to a Pentium 4 2.8 GHz to compare it with. Note that the results are in megaflops per second, and that I would expect the AMD chips to exceed at this benchmark as floating point calculations have always been their strongpoint.
Another real world test is MP3 creation. When ripping MP3's on my computer, this chip can keep up with my CD writer- the LiteOn 52x32x52 which is also reviewed on Epinions. This drive is well known for its audio extraction speed, and the chip can keep up with it creating MP3's at speeds of 20x to 41x depending on where you are on the disc.
Finally, this chip runs every program without any problem to date. the one downside is that it does run a little hotter than what I'm used to. It's never locked up, but you feel the heat coming out of the computer back, that's for sure.
In short, unless you only do video encoding for a living (the Pentium 4 is better for that), in most real world performance this is one formidable chip. I'm not bad mouthing the Pentium 4, but when this chip is half the price, it's really a no brainer which is the better value. Pricewise this chip compares to the Celeron, but performance wise it competes with the Pentium 4.
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Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
digitaldoc
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Location: New York
Reviews written: 21
Trusted by: 13 members
About Me:
Men don't outgrow their toys, they just get more expensive.
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