AMD AM2 product line (AM2 X2 5000+) Evaluation

Opteron 170 (clocked to 2.6 GHz)

Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe
1GB GeIL One DDR 400 @217MHz 
2-3-3-5

2x Leadtek PX7900GTX TDH 512MB Extreme (in Single and SLI for
game testing)
2x 74GB Western Digital Raptor 10,000 RPM SATA 150 HDDs
(RAID0)

Sony 16x DVD-ROM

SilverStone ST75ZF Zeus 750Watt Quad Rail PSU

Microsoft Windows XP Professional and Windows XP x64 Edition

Intel Platform:
Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 840 @3.72 GHZ (266×14) Hyper-Threading
enabled
Asus P5WD2-E Premium
1GB Corsair XMS2 DDR2-1066 (2×512) at DDR2-1066 5-5-5-15 2T

Leadtek PX7900GTX TDH 512MB Extreme

2x 74GB Western Digital Raptor 10,000 RPM SATA 150 HDDs
(RAID0)

Sony 16x DVD-ROM

SilverStone ST75ZF Zeus 750Watt Quad Rail PSU

Microsoft Windows XP Professional and Windows XP x64 Edition

My Choice of Intel platform was due to an unfortunate
occurrence.
My two Intel SLI boards were unavailable. One died a tragic
death due to a bad PSU and the other was on loan to another site for testing.
This left only the Asus P5WD2-E Premium as an acceptable mainboard for
comparison. Unfortunately, I was unable to conduct any SLI tests on this board
and only single card scores are shown below.
Once either of the two Intel SLI boards that we have in-house
is available, I will add in the SLI scores from that board.
Settings for the 7900GTX, unless otherwise noted, were
global profile for all games with Transparency AntiAliasing set to Supersample.
In addition to the software used for testing I also wanted
to simulate a real world environment, for this I installed the following
commonly used applications:
Microsoft Office 2003

SpeedFan
Diskeeper 10

Avast Home Edition

Acrobat Reader 
A HighSpeed PC TechStation was used for all testing.

Corsair?s Nautilus500 was used for cooling the overclocked
Opteron and the Intel XE840.

{mospagebreak title=Performance Tests}

The Tests:

Gaming: These four game titles have heavy physics and particle
effects throughout the game. They are in many cases capable of bringing even
the fastest system to a crawl.

Need For Speed Most Wanted: Although this is an older title, the physics involved with
high speed driving that the game emulates can have a serious impact on
performance and frame rate. Add into all of this physics fun, multiple cars
with their own physics, lighting effects, etc., and you not only have a
visually impressive game, but also one that can put a hurting on your CPU. For
testing I ran the Challenge test number Nine, this track is very winding with
many scenery changes, and in many cases the weather changes during the run
altering the lighting and shadows.

Windows XP Pro	Windows XP x64

Here, as in most games, the AMD AM2 is simply the faster
CPU. The feel of the game was smoother and more responsive on the AM2.
Considering the AM2 was run stock against two overclocked CPUs and still kept
around a 5 frame per second advantage.

F.E.A.R.
If you have not heard of this game you need to put
down the Funions and get out of the house. F.E.A.R. is a Monolith Productions
Game. Monolith has an inclination towards the darker side of gaming with titles
like Blood and Blood 2.  They incorporate a supernatural and creepy feel into an
immersive gaming experience. F.E.A.R. combines a good story line, impressive physics,
startlingly intelligent AI and heavy particle effects into a great game. For my
F.E.A.R. testing I sampled frame rates in the Interval -02 – Insertion level
from the entry at the gate to the point where you are blown out of the window
by the little girl. This section has quite a few combat sequences with some
good AI routines. The enemy clone soldiers perform complex fire and maneuver
tactics. Visual setting were 1600×1200 with all other settings at Maximum,
Volumetric Lighting and soft shadows were also enabled, Computer settings were
at Maximum and Difficulty was set to Extreme , this allowed from more complex AI routines
and more cunning enemy movements

Windows XP Pro	Windows XP x64

Our F.E.A.R testing again reveals the AM2?s ability to
handle complex gaming instructions faster.

Call of Duty 2:
Another game with quit a bit of action, Call of Duty 2, is a
bar fight of a game, with enemies around every corner and allies that jump
right in front of you while you?re shooting. The scenery around you is quite
well done, with many smoke and particle effects, this game can put a serious
dent in a system with a weak CPU. Again for testing, I chose settings that I
feel would impact the CPU the most. 1600×1200 with everything set to its
highest level and difficulty set on Veteran.
The level used for testing was the Demolition
portion of the Winter War level. This was played from start to the destruction of the German building.

Windows XP Pro	Windows XP x64

Call of Duty 2 shows what the other game tests have already
shown, even against an overclocked CPU the AM2 is able to maintain its lead.

Oblivion:
ElderScrolls IV Oblivion is a game that everyone is talking
about (and not all of it good). This game has a way of just plain putting a
hurting on your system. Both ATi and nVidia have had to patch their drivers
just for this game. There is also a heavy toll on your CPU as the game seems to
stutter and drag on slower CPUs. Memory is also important, and either not
enough or not fast enough memory, will impact your gameplay.
The display settings for Oblivion were 1600×1200, with all
other detail settings on their highest setting. AA was disabled as Oblivion
does not support HDR and AA at the same time.
The testing level I used was the opening level where you are
attempting to escape through the Emperor?s escape route. I followed this path
until I reached the second wooden door.

Oblivion was a pain to test; there is no true support for XP
x64 or the 7900GTX, so the auto hardware detection would not work properly,
requiring the settings to be manually set. In addition, because there is no
support for the 7900GTX I had to manually enable the SLI function. Without this I
saw no benefit from SLI at all. Once I had the settings correct, the game had
an annoying habit of cutting to a blank screen. The menus would work but there
was no display. I was able to tweak some of the settings, and setting the
renderinfo.txt to ?read only? helped with this. Once I had this problem out of
the way
I was able to complete my testing.

Windows XP Pro	Windows XP x64

Again, as in the other tests, the AM2 has a slight advantage
in speed against the overclocked Opteron and XE840.

{mospagebreak title=Application Tests}
Cinebench:

A new test at Planetx64 Cinebench is a nice tool that can be
used to gauge the rendering power of your system. Cinebench is a product of
Maxon, the same people who developed Cinema 4D. According to Maxon, Cinebench
is a real-world test for rendering power and is able to accurately show off a
particular system?s ability render in real-time. Cinebench is especially CPU
intensive, and is able to show scaling from one to up to 16 CPUs. I chose this
test to show off not only the raw rendering power of the AMD AM2 CPUs but also
the benefit of the x64 instructions built into all AMD Athlon 64s. (See our Lightwave 3D 8.5
review for more information.)

Here, the raw power of the AMD CPUs are evident, easily outperforming the
overclocked XE840 in the rendering tests. The AM2 still keeps its head above
the overclocked Opteron 170, even with the smaller cache size.

SuperPi:
SuperPi is a test that just about every PC enthusiast and
overclocker knows about and uses. This test relies heavily on your CPU and
CPU-to-memory speeds to calculate Pi out to some impressive decimal places. For
these tests, since all of the CPUs tested are Dual Core, I ran two tests
simultaneously. This shows the stability between the cores.

The scores here show the benefits a larger CPU cache can
have. With the 1066 FSB, the XE840 is able to outperform the AM2 and the Opteron
170. The XE840 has two megs of cache, one meg for each CPU core, just as the
Opteron 170 does. The relatively small instructions for the SuperPi
calculations are easily stored in cache for execution.