The Athlon XP - A performance boost on a budget (part 1)

PC gaming has many advantages over console gaming. You can patch games if there are any problems with them, you can modify them and add additional features and levels etc. like in Morrowind and Neverwinter Nights (not to mention FPS games) and perhaps most importantly of all you can still play your old favourites when you purchase new and faster hardware. Of course the flipside of this is that you occasionally buy software that simply won't perform on your existing hardware.

So what's the options then? Well some people take the drastic action of going out and buying a whole new system. This option is simply not an option for most of us gamers. Not only is it the most expensive option for increased performance but it leaves you with a surplus (and perfectly good in most cases) monitor, mouse keyboard etc. Not only that but most shop bought PCs come with a lot of second rate components that you would never dream of buying individually. The more realistic option for most people, and the only option for those hard-core gamers out there who like to hand pick performance components, is to upgrade.

In this first part of this two part article, we will look at the performance increase when upgrading from an AMD Athlon Thunderbird 900 to an AMD Athlon XP 2000+. The only components that have been upgraded are the CPU, motherboard and memory. This upgrade would cost effectively £270 although with falling memory and CPU prices this cost will only get cheaper. It should also be mentioned that the total price is cheaper than a top of the range Nvidia GeForce 4 graphics card.

This first section will look at the difference the upgrade makes to games that are primarily CPU intensive so as to see what kind of muscle the Athlon XP really has. We will look at three games to demonstrate this point. The games are Championship Manager, Tropico and Microsoft Train Simulator. We tried to keep the test setups as similar as possible to discount any variables.

The test setups

AMD Athlon 900
Gainward GeForce 4 MX440
512MB PC133 PQI RAM
Maxtor 20GB 7200rpm HDD
Videologic Sonic Fury
Abit KT7 motherboard
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition

AMD Athlon XP 2000+
Gainward GeForce 4 MX440
512MB PC2700 Crucial RAM
Maxtor 20GB 7200rpm HDD
Videologic Sonic Fury
Abit KX7-333R motherboard
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition

Championship Manager Season 01/02 (Sports Interactive/Eidos)
Sports Interactive's football management masterpiece may be text based but it can have lesser CPUs for breakfast. What we did to test the performance of the CPUs, was to create games using a different number of leagues (all the leagues had their respective minor leagues included). The normal database was used to setup the leagues. Please note that the figures in the chart below such as the 0.4 for the Athlon XP with 1 league means 40 seconds and not four tenths of a minute.

We can see that the Athlon XP makes light work of Championship Manager. To take only 10 minutes and 43 seconds to create a game with all 26 leagues is truly outstanding. The fact that it only takes 1 minute and 36 seconds to create a game with 5 leagues is also brilliant and would have taken me forever on my Pentium 2 233MHz which I had when the original Championship Manager 3 came out. For the 1 league test we used the English league. The 5 league test used England, Italy, Germany, Spain and France. The 10 league test used England, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Scotland, Holland, Brazil and Russia, France and Spain. All leagues had their minor leagues included where applicable.

Microsoft Train Simulator (Kuju/Microsoft)
Their Flight Simulator is legendary and Train Simulator is definitely heading the same way. Just like it's aviation brother, Train Simulator is a system hog and makes easy work of any system you can throw at it. To test our PCs out we drove through the Sagami Ono station and on until the end of the journey. This route is quite stressful and can seriously make your framerate dip. The Athlon XP manages a full 60fps on parts of the tracks but the Athlon 900 could not manage it here. It should be noted that a simulation is not the same as a first person shoot 'em up (where 60fps and up is desirable) and anything above 25fps is usually sufficient for an enjoyable experience.

What we see here is nothing short of fantastic from the Athlon XP. The journey we took part on is really stressful and yet the XP manages an average of 42fps at 1024x768. Any Train Sim fan will tell you that this is great performance. The Athlon 900 did OK but pauses were noticeable, although not too disturbing. All tests were in 32bit colour.

Tropico (PopTop Software/Take 2 Interactive)
PopTop Software's Caribbean God Sim uses both a Software 3D mode and a Hardware 3D mode. We decided not to look at the Hardware 3D mode as it yielded the full framerate on both systems. It is widely known, however, that the Hardware 3D mode is not the most stable of things and most users play in Software 3D mode. This also serves our purposes as what we are looking at is the performance of the CPU and not the graphics card. For those that are interested though the frame rate dips a lot on the Athlon 900 compared to the Athlon XP when the Hardware 3D mode is used.

The scores say it all really. There is a 100% improvement when playing at 1024x768 resolution, what more could you ask. These framerates where recorded on the Born Again scenario and at zoom level 3.

Well that's all for part 1 of this article. For part 2 (we are waiting for our GeForce 4 Ti 4200 to arrive) we will look at the Athlon XP in more detail and benchmark some FPS games as well as the performance destroying Morrowind. In the next part we will run some benchmarks with a GeForce 4 Ti 4200 as the GeForce 4 MX440 that we currently use is the performance bottleneck in our system and it does not allow the Athlon XP to truly flex it's muscle.

To be continued...

A special thanks to AMD for providing the Athlon XP processor, to Gainward for providing the GeForce4 MX440 and to Crucial for providing the PC 2700 DDR RAM.