AMD Socket 939 Athlon FX-53 and 3800+ Review :: Test Setup

In an attempt to get as much of an apple to apple comparison I tried to use as many of the exact same parts as possible. I used more than one board for the AMD platform for stability purposes and only a single Intel board. Since power requirements are getting higher I used an Epower 450W power supply that worked stable through all our tests. I would have used the latest ATI cards in our tests but the 9800XT had better availability, once again becoming our base test card. The AMD CPUs run as hot as the new Prescott CPU's and that could affect the overall overclocking headroom of the CPUs. With a water chilled unit you could push the unlocked MSI FX-53 939, but the 3900+ has a locked core.

AMD Test Platform

• CPUs: AMD Athlon 64 3800+/MSI FX-53 939 (2.4GHz)
• Motherboards: MSI ASUS Deluxe
• Memory: 1GB 2X 512MB Corsair PC3200
• Cooling:
• Hard Drives: 7200RPM Seagate 2X 80GB RAID 0
• VGA: GIGABYTE RADEON 9800XT 256MB

Intel Test Platform

Tests

• Sysmark 2004
• PCMark 2004
• 3dmark 2001 SE Build 330
• 3Dmark03 Build 340
• Quake3
• UT2003
• SpecViewPerf 7.1.1
• Prime95
• BurnIn Test Pro