AMD Athlon XP 2600+

Just when it looked like Intel was going to steal the performance thunder, AMD has kicked back with its most dramatic speed advances yet. We've waited over two months for the successor to the 1.8GHz Athlon XP 2200+, but not in vain. On Wednesday, the company officially launched its new 2400+ and 2600+ chips, clocked at 2GHz and 2.13GHz respectively, and PC Pro has already been lucky enough to receive a test sample.

This firstly means that AMD has broken the 2GHz barrier, although the company is still very much focusing on the XP model numbers - and why not? After all, 2600 is a good 400 more than 2200. The bigger question is whether it can still compete with the Pentium 4, which is currently available at up to 2.53GHz.

And the answer is a categorical yes. We tested the chip using VIA's new AGP 8x KT400 chipset with 512MB of PC2700 memory and an ATi Radeon 9700 Pro graphics card and achieved the fastest real world benchmarks results we've seen. An overall score of 1.65 puts the new Athlon way in front of the fastest 1.45 we've seen from 2.53GHz Pentium 4 machines, and is also impressive considering that a score of 1 is the same as a 2GHz Pentium 4 with 256MB of RAM.

Interestingly, the one area that the chip made a dramatic improvement to was database work, which can be very CPU-intensive. In our Access and FileMaker tests, the new Athlon was over twice as fast as the 2GHz reference machine. The other test areas like word processing, spreadsheets and 2D graphics were also improved with the new chip, although not by the same degree.

We also carried out 3D tests at 1,024 x 768 in 32-but colour, where 3DMark2001SE turned round a score of 13,918. This is, of course, incredibly fast, but not quite as much as we'd hoped for. It looks like VIA and ATi may still have some driver tweaking to do to get the best 3D performance.

But it's all good news for AMD. The Athlon XP can stably run at speeds over 2GHz and still compete with Intel's new architecture, which could be just what it needs in the months left before Hammer's release.

Ben Hardwidge

Author: Ben Hardwidge