The era of dual-core CPUs is upon us. Two heads really are better than one, as Bennett Ring demonstrates.
It was only a handful of years ago that the idea of two CPUs in one PC seemed too excessive even for the geekiest of the tweaker set. Who’d have thought that by today we’d have chips that are, for all intents and purposes, two separate CPUs in the same package? AMD performs this feat by mounting both CPU cores on a single silicon die, a path that Intel will soon take. The cores in the X2 4800+ are clocked at a hefty 2.4GHz, and each sports a 128KB L1 cache and 1MB of L2 cache. So what we’ve got with the 4800+ is, in effect, two 4000+ CPUs running under the hood of a single CPU. The move to a 90-nanometre manufacturing process has allowed AMD to somehow squeeze slightly over 230 million transistors into the same space as a single core package, and it draws even less power than the 4000+, at a meager 1.3V. Obviously it’s also native 64-bit, and includes SSE3 instructions. Making this performance pie even sweeter is the fact that you don’t need to upgrade to a new chipset – it’s quite happy to call most Socket 939 motherboards home after a simple BIOS fl ash. However, there is a slight concession that had to be made in regards to the integrated memory controller. Instead of each core having its own dedicated 128-bit memory controller, both cores are forced to share this component, which could theoretically lead to a bottleneck in the memory subsystem under certain circumstances. Thankfully our benchmark results show that it doesn’t seem to hinder this CPU in any meaningful way. Right about now you’d be forgiven for calling this chip the thorn in Intel’s multi-processing side, and as you’ll see, you’d be right on the money. We tested this chip with the ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard, 1GB of Corsair Pro Series PC3200 DDR-RAM, a GeForce 6800 Ultra video card and a Seagate 120GB SATA hard drive. A fresh install of Windows XP w/ Service Pack 2, DX9.0c with NVIDIA’s 78.01 graphics and 66.66 nForce drivers rounded out the software side of the equation. As the SiSoft memory benches show, the 4800+ is only marginally slower than a 4000+, but slightly quicker than a 3800+, when it comes to accessing memory. That old CPU benchmarking chestnut Comanche 4 was next off the blocks, scoring a rather tasty 81 frames per second. While we weren’t able to benchmark it directly against the Intel Extreme Edition 840, it’s closest competitor, a quick google shows that a similarly configured Intel 840 would clock in around 60fps, giving the 4800+ a sizeable lead. The final game benchmark was Doom 3 Demo 1, where it reached a scorching 135fps – compared to the 840’s average result of around 100fps it’s easy to see that the 4800+ is the master of the gaming field. To test the multithreading nature of the card, we ran the same Doom 3 benchmark, but this time ran a DivX encode at the same time, enough to bring a single-cored CPU howling to its bleeding knees. But as the results show, the 4800+ merely shrugged off the heavy workload – while the Doom 3 framerates suffered a little, it was still very playable. What these results don’t show you is just how responsive this CPU is at the Windows desktop when compared to a single-cored CPU. The difference between the two is like night and day, and once you’ve tasted the glory of multi-core you’ll dread going back. When it came time to overclock the 4800+, once again we left the testbench with a warm smile, not to mention a warm sensation in the nether regions too. We managed to hit 2.7GHz, giving us a hefty performance increase. And all of this was with the stock AMD cooler. So it’s blisteringly fast (if not quite as fast as AMD’s best single-core chips), makes Intel’s multi-core chips look like pocket calculators and is a half decent overclocker. So where’s the catch? Right here – $1400 worth of catches to be precise. But who ever said that having such an insanely powerful CPU would ever be cheap? If you want the best at the moment, this is it.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012