AMD Venice - More Testing
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POV-Ray
POV-Ray is a rendering program. For this test I ran the benchmark picture on the default resolution of 512 x 384 with no AA.
LAME
Now we have some audio encoding. I used the LAME codec with the front end program dBpowerAMP Music Converter. For the music I used the CD Linkin Park Meteor. I first copied the CD over to WAV files to take any bottleneck from the CD-ROM that may have occurred.
Once again there are no gains. I'm sure there are no bottlenecks, as I also tested the Venice overclocked. The score improved (went down) when overclocked, so that shows CPU speed was a main factor in these scores.
Memory Controller
The new Venice cores are supposed to have better, more up to date memory controller. Since we can’t take a look at the physical memory controller on the chip, we have to look at the results from them and see if the new one is really better like AMD says. The tests will be synthetic benchmarks, as they show possible performance differences. Here are the results from Sandra.
So much for that better memory controller, the Winchester posts the first definite win in these tests. The Winchester beat the Venice by over 200 MB/sec. I ran these test over a dozen times to make sure what I was getting was real. So how does this effect real life performance? Well, from our tests, not at all.
If you tried to use 4 sticks of memory with a Winchester, the memory speed would be put to DDR333 instead of DDR400. The Venice core is meant to fix this, allowing the memory to run DDR400. I put 2 GB of memory, 4 512MB sticks, and rebooted. It booted fine into windows, and was stable. I opened up CPU-Z, and this is what I got:
Oops! Look at the frequency. That memory controller doesn’t look like it is quite fixed yet. This was the auto setting in the BIOS for the memory speed. I next tried to set it to 200 MHz, and Windows couldn’t adjust. Next I put it back onto auto, and then got into windows, and with A64tweaker, I set the speed from 166MHz, to 200MHz, fined up CPU-Z. Same results, like I never even changed it. So much for that improved memory controller; it looks to me like they broke it.
Next: Conclusion >>
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