Print Article: Half-Life 2 Performance with Athlon XP



		Half-Life 2 Performance with Athlon XP November 21, 2004 Brandon Sandman Bell

Summary: Often times the latest and greatest graphics cards and games are tested on hardware that noone can afford. This is great for highlighting the performance of the product in question, but isn't useful for those on older processors. In this article we've rounded up five different Athlon XP configurations, ranging from the Athlon XP 2100+ all the way up to an overclocked Barton CPU at 2.4GHz in an attempt to see how these CPUs perform in Half-Life 2 with RADEON X800 PRO, X800 XT AGP, X800 XT Platinum Edition, GeForce 6800, 6800 GT, and 6800 Ultra. As you'll see, the RADEON X800 XT PE may not be the best purchasing decision if you're gaming on an Athlon XP 2100+. But which card is? Find out in this article!

Introduction Page:: ( 1 / 11 )

But just as Ferrari wouldn’t put 14” tires and wheels on an Enzo, you shouldn’t pair a GeForce 6800 Ultra or RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition with a component that would cripple its performance. Often times a gamer on a budget will spend all his money or the latest and greatest graphics card, and pair it with an anemic processor such as a Celeron or his three-year old Pentium 4 1.5GHz. This is simply a quick way to waste your money as the performance of the graphics card will be limited by the host CPU. This is where the term CPU-limited comes from and can be seen in our performance graphs when the frame rate stays the same regardless of screen resolution.

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At the same time there are countless gamers with Athlon XP processors who would like to enjoy the best Half-Life 2 experience possible but don’t have the money to upgrade their CPU and graphics card simultaneously. The million dollar question for them is how much performance can I expect from a GeForce 6800 GT or RADEON X800 XT? Basically, which graphics card provides the most bang for my buck? This article is designed to deliver those answers.

We’ve combined four different Athlon XP processors based on two different cores, Barton and Thoroughbred. Athlon XP models included are the XP 2100+, 2500+, 2800+ (Barton), and 3200+. We also threw in a few overclocked Barton numbers at 2.4GHz.

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Running alongside these Athlon XP processors are the latest graphics cards from ATI and NVIDIA: GeForce 6800, 6800 GT, 6800 Ultra, and RADEON X800 PRO, X800 XT AGP, and X800 XT Platinum Edition. Our goal is to determine which graphics card delivers the most bang for your buck at a given clock speed. As you’ll see in the benchmarks, it’s not always about owning the most expensive graphics card, especially if you have a slower processor, but the card that delivers the best combination of price/performance, hopefully saving you some money as a result. For help in determining which CPU is right for you for CPU upgrading, check out Chris’ Half-Life 2 CPU shootout article from last week.

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Overclocking canals_01a Page:: ( 9 / 11 )

Half-Life 2 – Direct3D

Overclocking canals_09 Page:: ( 10 / 11 )

Half-Life 2 – Direct3D

Conclusion Page:: ( 11 / 11 )

On the CPU side, ATI’s RADEON X800 PRO delivers the best price/performance ratio for Athlon XP 2100+ users, often finishing within a handful of frames of the high-end RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition. Therefore if you’re looking for a short-term solution the RADEON X800 PRO would be your best bet.

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The RADEON X800 XT AGP really shined on faster Athlon XP processors based on AMD’s Barton core. Barton features twice as much cache as Thoroughbred, and in the case of the Athlon XP 3200+, a 400MHz front-side bus. Barton chips are also highly overclockable, with many end users hitting clock speeds of 2.4GHz or more out of chips that often cost less than $100. (There are reports of Athlon XP-M 2500+ chips hitting 2.7GHz with air-cooling.) If you own a Barton-based Athlon XP system and have the budget to afford it, our top choice would be the RADEON X800 XT AGP.

The X800 XT AGP isn’t quite as fast as the top-of-the-line RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition, but since it ships with the same 16-pipeline architecture and a 500MHz graphics core with 500MHz GDDR3 memory, it still finishes within 5% of the X800 XT Platinum Edition under many conditions. And besides, the RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition is practically impossible to find anyway.

So there you have it, our top graphics card choices for Athlon XP users. Hopefully you’ve found this article a helpful resource in determining which graphics card performs best with your processor. As always, feel free to drop your thoughts in the news comments!

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