AMD Athlon 64 3800+
4. Prime95
AMD Athlon 64 3800+ - Page 4
Prime95
Prime95 is basically a Mersenne prime number discovery program. It's a great example of Distributed Computing but it's most loved by overclockers for its powerful system stress-testing and benchmarking abilities. It can torture test your CPU to produce its maximum heat or spit out any errors due to excessive overclocking. Also using the blend test it can consume all your physical memory and run error-checking tests on your modules to ensure their quality. However, right now we're mostly interested in it for its benchmarking capabilities.Here are the timings for our Athlon 64 3800+, Athlon XP 2000+ and an Intel P4 2.4GHz.
The power of the 3800+ is self-evident.We were excited to see that when comparing it to the Athlon XP processor, its calculations took almost half the time of the latter, therefore justifying it's name. However, when it comes to the Intel P4 running at 2.4GHz, we can see it falls behind but only for a few microseconds (µs).
You might wonder why we are comparing one of AMD's latest processors with a previous generation Intel Pentium 4 and actually be satisfied with the results. The fact is that AMD processors are well known for their lousy results in computational applications such as Prime95 and their generally decreased performance in applications where the actual CPU clock speed plays the most important role. Keep that in mind and also note that Prime95 is mostly optimised for Pentium 4 processors.
