AMD Athlon XP 2700+

Processor manufacturer and long-term Intel-competitor AMD has once again souped-up the Athlon, but this time with a host of architectural changes and a small increase in clock speed. Once again, PC Pro has already been lucky enough to receive a test sample of the all-new 2.17GHz Athlon XP 2700+, along with Nvidia's new nForce2 motherboard chipset.

So what's new? Firstly, the front side bus speed has increased to 333MHz, which means the chip can run synchronously with the memory clock, and theoretically results in much faster performance. Secondly, the die size has increased from 80mm to 84mm, giving more surface area to spread out the eight million transistors and thus generate less heat.

All of which means the Athlon can now clock up to 2.17GHz quite comfortably, and with two 256MB PC2700 CAS 2 DIMMS in the Dual DDR nForce2 board, we were eager to see the results for ourselves.

The first test was for 3D performance, which was gauged running 3DMark2001 SE with an ATi Radeon 9700 graphics card, and the results were a long way in front of any other AMD system we've seen. At 1,024 x 768 in 32-bit colour and 32-bit textures, the new chip returned a proud score of 14,694 - only just behind the 14,728 we got from the 2.8GHz Pentium 4. This dropped to 12,197 at 1,280 x 1,024, and shows that now AMD really can compete with Intel on the 3D front.

But it was in our 2D benchmarks that the new Athlon cleaned up - its overall score of 1.84 is simply phenomenal. By comparison the Athlon XP 2600+ managed 1.65, and the 2.8GHz Pentium 4 lagged slightly behind on 1.63 (a score of 1 refers to a 2GHz Pentium 4 with 256MB of RAM). Like the 2600+, the most impressive area was in database tests, with an overall result of 2.18, although every single one of the tests was a leap in front of anything else we've ever seen.

How much of this is down to AMD or Nvidia remains to be seen, but they seem to make a potent combination. Now it's down to Intel to see if the forthcoming 3GHz Pentium 4 can take back the crown, but in the meantime AMD is by far the performance king.

Author: Ben Hardwidge