Test System Setup
AMD Socket AM2
- AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 (2.8 GHz dual core)
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ (2.6 GHz dual core)
- ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe (nForce 590 chipset)
- 2 GB (4 x 512MB) of Corsair DDR2/800 XMS2 Pro (4-4-4-12) memory
AMD Socket 939
- AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 (2.6 GHz dual core)
- ASUS A8R-MVP motherboard (R480 chipset)
- 2 GB (4 x 512MB) of Corsair DDR400 (2.5-3-3-6) memory
Intel System
- Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 955 (3.46 GHz dual core)
- Intel D975XBX motherboard (975X chipset)
- 2 GB (4 x 512MB) of Corsair DDR2/800 XMS2 Pro (4-4-4-12) memory
All three test setups shared the following system components.
- ATI Radeon X1900 XTX (Catalyst 6.4)
- Maxtor MaxLine III 250 GB SATA (16 MB buffer) hard drive
- Plextor PX-712S DVD drive
- Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi sound card
- Enermax 550 Watt ATX power supply unit
The three test systems were built using the newest BIOS release and chipset and add-in component drivers. Anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, and vsync were forced off in the graphics control panel during all game testing. Windows XP Professional (SP2) was loaded and configured to have automatic updates, system restore, and all unnecessary startup services disabled. And unless otherwise noted the licensed version of Fraps 2.7.3 was used to record performance scores. Testing was conducted using the following software:
- PCMark05 (v1.1.0)
- Microsoft’s Windows Media Encoder
- Falcon 4: Allied Force (v1.0.6)
- IL-2: Pacific Fighters (v4.0.4)
- MS Flight Simulator 2004 (v9.1)
- Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (v1.05)
- Call of Duty 2 (v1.02)
In recent dual-core articles SimHQ has scaled back somewhat by not testing our entire benchmark suite, yet for this article we decided to include a few more titles to see how they fare with the additional system bandwidth the AM2 systems offer.
