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AMD's Athlon XP 2700+
kraven_73 writes "According to some Taiwanese sources, AMD will officially reveal its Athlon XP 2700+ processor on the 7th of October. Most interesting is that this CPU will have a 333 MHz FSB. The first implementation of this increased FSB on Athlon platform. It is expected that the novelty will be based on the latest Thoroughbred core stepping 1, just like the current Athlon XP 2400+ and 2600+, and will work at 2.17GHz."
Okay, let me preface this by saying I'm genuinely curious about the answer. So I'm not trying to sow the troll seeds here.
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That said, I'm curious about what people are using these super-fast processors for. Apart from upgrading so that you can play the immiment Unreal Tournament 2003 demo ("Only two weeks away!") and hoping to get the jump on a Doom 3 system -- what exactly are people doing with their super-high powered rigs?
I just upgraded to an Athlon XP 2000+ (from a PIII), and while I sorta dug the impressive 3DMark2001SE scores (over 10,000 with a Ti4600), I'm still not exactly sure what I need all this speed for.
For gaming, yes.
But for what else? MS Word still opens in a split-second.
OpenOffice 1.01 still opens pretty quickly.
IE, Netscape, and Opera still open in a split-second.
And, yes, now I run Quake3 with all the settings cranked.
But this sorta of "gee whiz, that's cool" wore off in a couple of days.
Now I'm left with a pretty powerful system, but I'm at loss as to what it has actually improved. Maybe if I were doing a lot of coding, then the compilation speeds would jump significantly, but I guess since my main coding right now is writing a fairly small (only around 6,500 lines) text-adventure in INFORM, I haven't really seen the jump in compilation speeds I'd see if I were compiling hundreds of thousands of lines of code
So, I'm curious. I haven't tried NWN yet, so maybe that's the sort of high-powered cybercrank I need to get myself hooked on the slickmercury speeds of AXP 2000+ and Ti4600.
There's always the new Neocron (sp?) beta 4 out
Anyone?
nope, the original poster was (somewhat) correct.
It's true the ram doesn't need to run at the same frequency than the FSB, but it doesn't help if it runs faster (DDR 333 ram has a bandwidth of 2.7GB, but the FSB at DDR 266 only 2.1GB). So, the FSB is not the bottleneck if you have DDR 266 ram, but it definitely is with DDR 333 ram. (There is an exception to the rule that higher-bandwidth-than-fsb ram won't do much for performance, this is if agp texturing is used, but this really only matters if you have an integrated graphics chipset.)
That said, tests with the higher (333) FSB show decent, but not really large performance increases - the Athlon XP doesn't seem to be that much memory bandwidth limited today.
I also disagree with the original poster about just using DDR 400. Not only a JEDEC specification for DDR 400 ram doesn't exist (and DDR 400 ram is needed to get really a performance improvement out of a DDR 400 FSB), but first boards which support such rams have some stability problems obviously at that speeds (the new asus kt400 board only allows one (!) dimm at DDR400 speed, and 2 at DDR333 speed). So, this would most likely be a nightmare for board manufacturers.
mczak