Athlon Dual Core: Overclocking the 4200+

Gaming Performance

It is very interesting that almost all the game benchmarks are slightly higher on the 2.4GHz 1MB cache 4000+ than on the 4200+ Dual-Core (2.2GHz with 512KB Cache on each core). As Anand pointed out in the X2 launch article, this is in line with AMD's claims. Gaming today is heavily single threaded and the dual core performs about the same as a similar speed single core. However, the difference between the 4000+ and 4200+ is generally very small.

Most of the gaming benchmarks respond very well with the X2 overclock to 2.7GHz and yield impressive performance returns with the extra 500MHz.















Looking closely it is very interesting that two of the most recent games, Doom 3 and Half Life 2, seem to have their performance almost entirely dictated by the graphics card. With the increases in graphics power we tested all games at 1280x1024 where possible. Whether 2.2GHz, 2.4GHz with double the cache, or 2.7GHz, Doom 3 and Half Life 2 performed about the same using the same graphics card at the same 1280x1024 resolution.

The game benchmarks we use for memory testing were much more responsive to processor speed increases. Wolfenstein ET saw a 18.4% increase in a 22.5% CPU speed boost, and Q3 increased 16%. UT2004 performed similarly at 16%, while Far Cry was in-between at 9.5%. These results should give you a good idea of why we use Wolfenstein-ET and Q3 for memory benchmarking.