Re: eracer, the article seems pretty well written.
If you think is pathetic, why don't you refute it point by point?
You asked for it. ;)
Set Cool 'n' Quiet Default to Disabled
- With Cool & Quiet enabled, AMD processors will throttle in order to save power and bring their thermal load down. This means the processor could be running as low as 800MHz in certain programs – no matter what the program is. In theory Cool & Quiet is supposed to throttle up to maximum in games but this is not always the case. No enthusiast PC goes out with Cool & Quiet enabled unless it’s a fanless machine or media center.
OK, so C&Q is set to "enabled" by default in the old BIOS. Does that mean the test system must have had it enabled? No. If it was enabled does it mean the AMD CPU driver was installed and the power management set to use C&Q? No. If C&Q was active could the frequency go to 800MHz? No, 1GHz minimum if the HT was at the stock 1GHz setting. It there evidence that the A64 was "stuck" running at almost 1/3 the stated frequency. No, otherwise the benchmarks would have been far lower.
Add Support for AMD Athlon 64 FX60 CPU
- According to DFI the FX-60 will not operate correctly without this bios update. Without official support for the FX-60 CPU I’m not sure what we’re comparing against here.
There is no official support for 1.8GHz Athlon 64 3000+s clocked to 2.7GHz either, but we do know the 2.7GHz Athlon 64s will perform much better than the stock 1.8GHz ones.
Fix Memory Timings 2-1-1-1-1 and 4-1-1 Mode Wrong & Fix Read Preamble Table Error.
- Memory latency can make a massive difference in performance. If the latency was not running at the correct latency we can see a pretty big difference in all kinds of performance. Anandtech stated “The AMD system used 1GB of DDR400 running at 2-2-2/1T timings…” Apparently this isn’t the case, but they would not be able to tell without having the platform in house.
This could be a legitimate issue if the RAM is running 2T instead of 1T or something similar. Unfortunately Rahul doesn't clarify what the error means and what latencies might have actually changed. Perhaps he should find a comparison someone has done between the old and new BIOSes to find out if this is a significant performance issue rather than leaving it as open-ended speculation.
I wonder if he believes that the pre-production Conroe BIOS/motherboard is fault-free. Is it just production AMD motherboards plagued with performance reducing bugs, or might the pre-production Conroe BIOS have some performance-related warts as well?
As long as he is speculating about memory latency and BIOS perhaps he could speculate what would happen to Conroe performance if the production boards support DDR2-800 or 3-3-3 DDR2-667 instead of the 4-4-4 DDR2-667 used in the review.
Fix Fill 3114 SVID&SSID under Cross fire mode.
- More apparent performance issues under Crossfire mode.
What kind of issues? Performance or compatibility? Rahul doesn't give the reader any idea.
Next, when you take a future Intel chipset and compare it to a chipset that no enthusiast supports (RD480) with an outdated bios it’s like taking a Ferrari and putting it on Bias-Ply tires. It’s just not a good way to show off a “new” technology.
Had Intel taken an RD580 (Crossfire Xpress 3200) and coupled with the AMD Athlon FX-60 processor they almost certainly would have seen some better numbers just based on the bios issues alone. The ATi Xpress 3200 would have improved the overclocking and decoding performance as well. You don’t need a time machine to jump over to the nearest Newegg and buy the latest parts. It’s almost like Intel took their time machine 6 months ahead while throwing AMD into a time warp set a few months back in time.
Absolute dishonesty here. Does he actually believe the RD580 performs much better than the RD480 when it's a well-known fact performance among all types of chipsets doesn't vary by much? He claims the RD480 is a "Ferrari on Bias-Ply tires" yet provides no benchmarks. Real benchmarks show (unsurprisingly) that RD580 has very little to no performance advantage over RD480.
vr-zone.com
Though this isn’t exactly conclusive, if you go back and re-read some old FX-57 reviews on Tom’s Hardware you’ll see a benchmark for the same game set at the same resolution, the FX-57 running at 2.8GHz scored 183.4fps. The funny thing is it’s using an Nvidia Geforce 6800 GT which seems to me that something is totally wrong here. Note that a single core Athlon 64 4000 achieved a better score in the benchmark run by Tom (160.5fps) than the one provided by Intel (160.4) at IDF. Here is a link to Tom’s review.
More dishonesty here. An apples-to-violins comparison. I can do that too:
The THG review "proves" the 3.6GHz P4 660 is way more than twice as fast as an FX-60 in Unreal Tournament 2004. The FPS of the 3.6GHz P4/6800GT in the THG review is 136.7 FPS at a high-resolution of 1280x1024. The FX-60 with the advantage of a low 800x600 resolution and a faster GeForce 7800 GTX 512 in this Tech Report article is only 90.4 FPS.
techreport.com
Not exactly conclusive, but it does indicate that just about any P4 might be a far, far better processor than the FX-60 in Unreal Tournament 2004. |
