- Joined
- Feb 4, 2003
- Location
- SF Bay Area
Looking through the AMD sections on several forums, we see hundreds of threads daily regarding mobile Bartons, 1700+/1800+ DLT3C's, DFI Lanparties, Abit NF7's; anything and everything to do with the Athlon XP. However, it seems that information and even interest on AMD's latest and greatest, the Athlon74, is completely nonexistant. When I was planning my system, just about everyone's sentiment was to wait, and buy a mobile Barton in the meantime. What seems to be the public opinion is that A64's are overpriced, difficult to overclock, and have flaky hardware and software support at best. Hopefully I can put an end to these myths.
The processor I picked was the 3200+ DTR, as, according to the description at Newegg, it would be a CG revision, unlike the desktop versions, which to date appear to all be of C0. A newer stepping generally means more overclockability, and considering that this is the same revision as the 2.4GHz FX-53's, one would think it should fare pretty well. DTR stands for Desktop Replacement. It is not a true mobile processor. Furthermore, it is not unlocked beyond a 10x multiplier, and no Athlon64, not even a true mobile, is. The only real difference other than the revision is that the DTR lacks a heatspreader, which supposedly helps temps by a couple of degrees.
The motherboard I chose is the Gigabyte GA-K8N Pro, which uses the nVidia nForce3 150 chipset. Arguably, the most popular board choice is the Shuttle AN50-R, however, I opted against this for the reason that it seemed to be responsible for plenty of A64 deaths, even without excessive vcore or vdimm. Users that had it reported it to be difficult to deal with, and that it required many BIOS swaps, etc. Before I invoke the wrath of Maxvla, I'll say that for every failure of this board there seems to be a sucess story. However, Shuttle was simply a brand I didn't trust. My top two choices for motherboards are always Abit and Asus, but unfortunately, they do not have any motherboards out based on the nForce3 chipset, each utilizing the VIA K8T800 chipset, which lacks an AGP, which is crucial for my Radeon 9800. The only solid brand(IMHO) that had a board based on the nForce3 250 was Gigabyte, and the price, at $120, and loaded to the brim with goodies, was right.
I used the Thermalright SLK948U heatsink, as watercooling was beginning to become too LAN-unfriendly for me. The heatpipe-equipped SP-98 is around the corner, supposedly, but with the ridiculously high pricetag generally placed on the SP line, I most likely would have opted against it, even had it been out at the time. The heatpipe does not make a significant difference in cooling ability, considering the design of Thermalright's heatsinks. The processor, being a DTR, lacks a heatspreader, thus requires the heatsink to be mounted slightly lower than a desktop. I added washers while mounting the heatsink as a precaution, but I think that this was unnecessary with the nature of the SLK948's mounting mechanism.
The only two PCI devices that I am running are a Promise FastTrack S150 TX2Plus Serial ATA controller, and a Soundblaster Audigy2. In order to avoid hard drive corruption that results from high PCI buses, a controller card supporting 66MHz PCI buses is required. This card fits the bill perfectly, and allows very aggressive overclocking without issue. The Soundblaster also can handle PCI buses in excess of 50MHz.
Unfortunately, I'm still using my old PC3200 memory, which tops out at about 228MHz.
So, how does all of this hardware actually do?
After messing around with it a bit:
Core voltage at 1.7v in BIOS, reported to be 1.74.
The memory bus is running asyncronously to the HTT bus, at only 210MHz. I'm keeping it conservative for now, but I'll be getting memory that should be able to handle much higher speeds this week. So far, it seems 100% stable. The only thing that I can not attest to ATM is Prime95; I'll do a thorough run in a few hours. However, it's handled several hours of benchmarking, gaming, etc, at this speed.
Effortlessly trounces all the reference results, even though Sandra really isn't its forte.
3D performance is where it really shines. So far, I've gotten 22796 3DMarks in 3DMark2001SE. The asyncronous memory is really holding it back. Should be able to do over 1000 marks higher 1:1. With everything at stock(9800 Pro stock speeds) it got quite a respectable 19506. At stock speeds, it outdid my T-Bred at 2.6GHz by close to 1000 points.
I know, not too far from what you've expected. After all, we've all seen the benchies. We all know that it tops most processors in synthetic performance, but what does this mean in reality? I can honestly say that it was worth every last penny. If the A64 looks great on paper, it feels spectacular in real-world performance. Everything runs smoother than ever; games look breathtakingly quicker. And this is at stock speeds. I've got a couple of friends who upgraded from P4C's to A64's. When they said that it loaded things quicker, and "felt" faster, I thought they were just full of it. However, not even the benchmarks can show how much nicer it really feels. An AthlonXP, at just about any speed, cannot touch an A64. You'd need to be at about 3.1GHz with a mobile Barton to compete with a 2.5GHz in synthetic benchmarks, and I can guarantee that even at those speeds, it will still lack the smoothness of an A64.
The fact of the matter is, you can take a retail A64, load it with generic CAS2.5 memory, run it at stock, and still have it trounce even aggressively overclocked mobile Bartons, and even P4C's in synthetic performance, and by even more in real-world performance. The revisions due in the future (dual-channel support, PCI locks, etc.) most likely will make a very small difference. IMHO, this is not the right time to invest in an AthlonXP or Pentium4 setup. The A64 is in a totally different league. It doesn't even need the slightest bit of overclocking for its performance level to be realized. Futhermore, as an overclocking processor, the A64 DTR is outstanding. My 1700+ DLT3C required 1.95v on watercooling to accomplish 2.5GHz. This processor effortlessly makes it that far on aircooling with only 1.75v.
Some notes:
The process to get this far was not as smooth as one would have wished. For some reason, the processor defaults at 1.1v, but still at 2 GHz. I spent close to two hours trying to find out why it couldn't boot, swapping HD's, etc, only to find that it was running at such a low voltage. Bumped it up to 1.5v, and it was all good.
As I began to overclock, I noticed that Sandra and just about everything non-3D ran perfectly. However, running 3DMark or a game would cause the system to hang in 10 secs even with a modest overclock. I tried running at 250x4, and the same happened. What was causing this was that Clockgen was automatically raising the AGP bus as I changed the HT bus. Frankly, I was impatient and reckless, so I failed to notice this for a while, which also wasted about an hour. As soon as I took note of this, though, overclocking was as smooth as butter.
Is the A64 worth it at this time? Pass your own judgement.
The processor I picked was the 3200+ DTR, as, according to the description at Newegg, it would be a CG revision, unlike the desktop versions, which to date appear to all be of C0. A newer stepping generally means more overclockability, and considering that this is the same revision as the 2.4GHz FX-53's, one would think it should fare pretty well. DTR stands for Desktop Replacement. It is not a true mobile processor. Furthermore, it is not unlocked beyond a 10x multiplier, and no Athlon64, not even a true mobile, is. The only real difference other than the revision is that the DTR lacks a heatspreader, which supposedly helps temps by a couple of degrees.
The motherboard I chose is the Gigabyte GA-K8N Pro, which uses the nVidia nForce3 150 chipset. Arguably, the most popular board choice is the Shuttle AN50-R, however, I opted against this for the reason that it seemed to be responsible for plenty of A64 deaths, even without excessive vcore or vdimm. Users that had it reported it to be difficult to deal with, and that it required many BIOS swaps, etc. Before I invoke the wrath of Maxvla, I'll say that for every failure of this board there seems to be a sucess story. However, Shuttle was simply a brand I didn't trust. My top two choices for motherboards are always Abit and Asus, but unfortunately, they do not have any motherboards out based on the nForce3 chipset, each utilizing the VIA K8T800 chipset, which lacks an AGP, which is crucial for my Radeon 9800. The only solid brand(IMHO) that had a board based on the nForce3 250 was Gigabyte, and the price, at $120, and loaded to the brim with goodies, was right.
I used the Thermalright SLK948U heatsink, as watercooling was beginning to become too LAN-unfriendly for me. The heatpipe-equipped SP-98 is around the corner, supposedly, but with the ridiculously high pricetag generally placed on the SP line, I most likely would have opted against it, even had it been out at the time. The heatpipe does not make a significant difference in cooling ability, considering the design of Thermalright's heatsinks. The processor, being a DTR, lacks a heatspreader, thus requires the heatsink to be mounted slightly lower than a desktop. I added washers while mounting the heatsink as a precaution, but I think that this was unnecessary with the nature of the SLK948's mounting mechanism.
The only two PCI devices that I am running are a Promise FastTrack S150 TX2Plus Serial ATA controller, and a Soundblaster Audigy2. In order to avoid hard drive corruption that results from high PCI buses, a controller card supporting 66MHz PCI buses is required. This card fits the bill perfectly, and allows very aggressive overclocking without issue. The Soundblaster also can handle PCI buses in excess of 50MHz.
Unfortunately, I'm still using my old PC3200 memory, which tops out at about 228MHz.
So, how does all of this hardware actually do?
After messing around with it a bit:
Core voltage at 1.7v in BIOS, reported to be 1.74.
The memory bus is running asyncronously to the HTT bus, at only 210MHz. I'm keeping it conservative for now, but I'll be getting memory that should be able to handle much higher speeds this week. So far, it seems 100% stable. The only thing that I can not attest to ATM is Prime95; I'll do a thorough run in a few hours. However, it's handled several hours of benchmarking, gaming, etc, at this speed.
Effortlessly trounces all the reference results, even though Sandra really isn't its forte.
3D performance is where it really shines. So far, I've gotten 22796 3DMarks in 3DMark2001SE. The asyncronous memory is really holding it back. Should be able to do over 1000 marks higher 1:1. With everything at stock(9800 Pro stock speeds) it got quite a respectable 19506. At stock speeds, it outdid my T-Bred at 2.6GHz by close to 1000 points.
I know, not too far from what you've expected. After all, we've all seen the benchies. We all know that it tops most processors in synthetic performance, but what does this mean in reality? I can honestly say that it was worth every last penny. If the A64 looks great on paper, it feels spectacular in real-world performance. Everything runs smoother than ever; games look breathtakingly quicker. And this is at stock speeds. I've got a couple of friends who upgraded from P4C's to A64's. When they said that it loaded things quicker, and "felt" faster, I thought they were just full of it. However, not even the benchmarks can show how much nicer it really feels. An AthlonXP, at just about any speed, cannot touch an A64. You'd need to be at about 3.1GHz with a mobile Barton to compete with a 2.5GHz in synthetic benchmarks, and I can guarantee that even at those speeds, it will still lack the smoothness of an A64.
The fact of the matter is, you can take a retail A64, load it with generic CAS2.5 memory, run it at stock, and still have it trounce even aggressively overclocked mobile Bartons, and even P4C's in synthetic performance, and by even more in real-world performance. The revisions due in the future (dual-channel support, PCI locks, etc.) most likely will make a very small difference. IMHO, this is not the right time to invest in an AthlonXP or Pentium4 setup. The A64 is in a totally different league. It doesn't even need the slightest bit of overclocking for its performance level to be realized. Futhermore, as an overclocking processor, the A64 DTR is outstanding. My 1700+ DLT3C required 1.95v on watercooling to accomplish 2.5GHz. This processor effortlessly makes it that far on aircooling with only 1.75v.
Some notes:
The process to get this far was not as smooth as one would have wished. For some reason, the processor defaults at 1.1v, but still at 2 GHz. I spent close to two hours trying to find out why it couldn't boot, swapping HD's, etc, only to find that it was running at such a low voltage. Bumped it up to 1.5v, and it was all good.
As I began to overclock, I noticed that Sandra and just about everything non-3D ran perfectly. However, running 3DMark or a game would cause the system to hang in 10 secs even with a modest overclock. I tried running at 250x4, and the same happened. What was causing this was that Clockgen was automatically raising the AGP bus as I changed the HT bus. Frankly, I was impatient and reckless, so I failed to notice this for a while, which also wasted about an hour. As soon as I took note of this, though, overclocking was as smooth as butter.
Is the A64 worth it at this time? Pass your own judgement.
![d]g[ts](/forums/data/avatars/m/34/34071.jpg?1626886303){kind=avatar}
