Review- AMD Athlon XP 2000+ vs. Intel  Pentium 4 Northwood

Techware Labs gratefully recognizes AMD's support in making this review possible!

Review by Edward Chang, call sign: Big_E

May 7, 2002

Benchmarks:

Test Systems:

AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (Provided by AMD) 

Default clock: 1666 MHz (12.5x133)

Stable Overclock: 1750 MHz (12.5x140 MHz, 1.85v)

Intel Pentium 4 Northwood 1.6A

Default clock: 1600 MHz (16x100)

Stable Overclock: 2000 MHz (16x125, 1.6v)

FIC AN11 (VIA KT266A) for AMD Athlon XP

VIA P4XB-SA (VIA P4X266A) for Intel P4 Northwood

256 MB Kingmax PC2700 CL2.5 DDR RAM  (Provided by Kingmax)

ATi Radeon 8500 (Provided by Directron)

Maxtor 40GB 7200 RPM Ultra ATA 133

Windows 98 Second Edition

Compaq 15" monitor

Drivers

ATi Radeon driver version 9021 for Win9X/ME

DirectX 8.1 Final For Windows 9x/ME

VIA 4-in-1 v.4.37

Benchmarks

Quake 3 Arena w/ Point Release 127g Via Arena Demo

3DMark2001 Second Edition

SiSoft Sandra 2002

PCMark2002

Video2000

*Overclocking:

*Overclock at your own risk! Hardware Pub will not take any responsibility for damages caused by overclocking.

The Athlon XP 2000+ came locked. No unlocking attempt was made, thus forcing us to overclock with a 12.5X multiplier limitation. A high multiplier clock, such as this, restricts the front side bus potential. In our case, we were able to perform tests of the Athlon XP 2000+ running at a maximum stable speed of 1750 MHz (12.5x140 MHz, 1.85 volts). The default clock frequency is 1663 MHz.

The Intel Pentium 4 Northwood 1.6A is raved as the next Celeron 300A-like processor. Its release accompanied the Northwood 2.0A, thus one can infer that the 1.6A is severely underclocked. This was indeed the case, as this CPU can easily run at speeds exceeding 2 GHz. Since the AMD XP 2000+ is suppose to be on par to a P4 running at 2 GHz, we overclocked the Northwood 1.6A to 2 GHz, using a 125 MHz front side bus (500 MHz according to Intel's Quad-Pumped Bus Technology) and 1.6 volts. The 1.6A was locked at a 16X multiplier.The upcoming Pentium 4 Northwoods will feature a new 533 MHz Quad-Pump FSB, so by running at this higher FSB, we are in essence simulating performance closer to these new processors. Unfortunately, this will give the overclocked Northwood 2.0A a given speed advantage over a normal clocked 400 MHz FSB Northwood 2.0A. However, by running the FSB at 125 MHz, we are bringing the system and memory bandwidth closer to the standard 133 MHz specification of the AMD setup.  In reality, one will see that Intel's "400 MHz FSB" has no evident performance advantage over a similar AMD system. One should think of it as just a 100 MHz FSB.

Let's see what these can do.

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