Conclusion

With these benchmarks, the graphs speak for themselves. All you need to do is to take a look at the applications you run most and take a look at the performance. That said, there are a few general themes

1. Opteron’s are fast, even for games.
Although games do not take advantage of multiple processors at this time, it’s pretty clear that the Opteron 252 at 2.6GHz performs comparably to the Athlon FX-55 at 2.6GHz. This suggests that the performance losses from running Registered DDR-RAM are countered by the second CPU’s ability to handle the “housekeeping” tasks.

2. The Athlon64 X2 is a superstar
As fast as the Opteron’s are, the Athlon64 X2 was a true superstar. The X2 4200+ was always in the same ballpark as the dual Opteron 252’s, but at 1/3 to 1/4th of the price! We haven’t had a chance to bring Dual-Core Pentiums into this benchmark, but at least amongst AMD’s own line-up the Athlon64 X2 is amazing. Without the need to run registered RAM, and the ability to go with exotic technologies such as 2-2-2-5 or OCZ DFI-customer RAM, our bottom-of-the-line Athlon64 X2 4200+ is able to outperform the more expensive FX-57 in all of our digital video and digital photography tests. Higher-end Athlon64 X2 models should be even better. The combo of the X2 4200+ with the 7800 GTX gives you great gaming performance and great workstation performance.




3. The Hitachi T7K250 is also a superstar.
The Hitachi T7K250 is nothing short of amazing. A single T7K250 running on SATA-II (300MB/sec with NCQ) on our nForce4 SLI board was able to outperform the Western Digital Raptor 74GB in the majority of our synthetic tests. At the moment, we can find no reason to recommend the WD Raptor over the Hitachi – if reliability is a concern, a RAID-1 mirrored array of two T7K250’s still gives the better value for the money. Of course, a drive with a 10,000 rpm spindle, SATA-II 300MB/sec, and NCQ might even be better!

4. Quadro FX4400’s are fast for everything
You have to remember that the GeForce 6800 Ultra boards I used were not your traditional GF6800 Ultras; they were the flagship products from BFG Tech. BFG knows what they’re doing and they were one of the first board manufacturers to rely upon NVIDIA’s drivers as their reference standard rather than try to waste time and rebadge the Detonator drivers under their own custom settings. Of course, this means that the GF6800 Ultra was clocked at higher speeds than your non-BFG Tech GF6800 Ultras.

In games, the Quadro FX4400 held its own against the game-optimized GeForce 6800 Ultra GPUs and for workstation applications, there was no contest in the superiority of the Quadro FX4400.

While we wouldn’t recommend buying Quadro FX4400’s in gaming systems, this clearly is something to keep in mind if your company is offering to buy a workstation for you, and are reluctant to spend the extra cash on upgrading to a “gaming GPU” such as the GeForce 6800 Ultra but are completely open to buying you a high-end Quadro (don’t laugh – I had MANY emails last build guide discussing the same thing).

5. Low-latency/standard bandwidth and high-bandwidth/high-latency RAM have non-overlapping talents
For most benchmarks, low-latency 2-2-2-5 PC3200 RAM performed very similarly to
“PC4650” running at 3-4-4-10. When working with video transcoding software, however, the high-bandwidth RAM seems to trump everything. The worst case scenario for the high-bandwidth RAM was a 7% performance loss in comparison to the low-latency 2-2-2-5 RAM, but for video transcoding the low-latency / standard bandwidth RAM was a staggering 38% slower than the high-bandwidth / high-latency RAM. Clearly, it’s important to understand your task. We like the fact that OCZ technology understands this and offers both high-bandwidth/high-latency RAM and low-latency/standard-bandwidth RAM allowing the user to buy the right RAM for their tasks. Corsair is focused more on low-latency rather than high-bandwidth, however they do produce reliable modules and come up with exotic bling like the LED driven XPERT series.

Wrap Up

That concludes day 4 of our 2005 Eternal Battle. I think it’s pretty clear that even though we spent $4k on the parts for our ultimate desktop and $9k for our ultimate workstation, the Athlon64 X2 4200+ with the 7800GTX proves that you don’t have to decide between gaming or work – you can enjoy both and that the best-value system is an approach worth taking. The concept of $600 for your CPU and $600 for your GPU seems like a great approach.

Our final article will be going up next week. The topic is related to the Athlon 64 X2 and GeForce 7800 GTX related (which you probably could have guessed), but the real question is what kind of system it’s going to be… how much will we spend? What new toys will we discuss? Come back tomorrow for the final article of this year’s Eternal Battle.