AMD ATHLON XP 2500 MOBILE REVIEW

"AMD Athlon XP 2500 Mobile review testing the mobile version of the Athlon XP 2500, all of the recent attention in the processor market has been directed towards the new 64bit Athlon64. We will show what performance the Athlon XP 2500 Mobile can deliver at stock and overclocked to 2.4 Ghz."

Today we are testing the mobile version of the Athlon XP 2500, all recent attention in the cpu market has been directed at the Athlon64 processors. We feel that the 32bit Athlon XP still has a future and with the release of the mobile Athlon XP 2500 we will show you what kind of performance it can deliver. There are no major differences between the mobile and desktop athlon xp processors apart from two very important differences. The first is the default core voltage which for the mobile xp 2500 is 1.45v compared to v1.65 for the desktop xp 2500. The second difference is that all mobile processors are unlocked which means that you can change the multiplier, most new desktop processors are now supplied locked. What all this means for performance is that you can overclock the mobile xp 2500 far higher than the desktop xp 2500.

I started off by increasing the FSB from it's standard speed of 133mhz to 166mhz, I then reduced the multiplier from 14 to 11. The cpu was now running stable at xp 2500 speed of 1.8 GHZ (11x166 MHZ) and at the default voltage of v1.45. I then increased the FSB to 200mhz and also increased the voltage to v1.55, the processor was hitting 2.2ghz easily and never reached 32c even under heavy benchmarking. I was very impressed with the athlon xp 2500 mobile for reaching xp 3200 speeds at a lower voltage so I decided to push the processor even higher. I increased the multiplier to 12 and voltage to v1.70 for a speed of 2.4ghz which is an overclock of 600mhz!!!

SISOFTWARE SANDRA 2004 PROCESSOR - ALU DHRYSTONE 9124 7221 PROCESSOR - FPU WHETSTONE 3764 2995 MULTI-MEDIA - INTEGER 22046 17441 MULTI-MEDIA - FLOATING POINT 22251 17666 2.4 GHZ (12x400 MHZ) 1.8 GHZ (11x166 MHZ) COMMENT - "In all of the these SiSoftware Sandra 2004 Benchmarks the 2.4Ghz Athlon XP 2500 Mobile outperformed the 1.8Ghz Athlon XP 2500 by 21%."

SYNTHETIC BENCHMARKS 3DMARK 2001 SE 15488 13165 3DMARK 2003 5221 4226 CPU BENCH 2003 7369 5637 METABENCH 3711 2818 2.4 GHZ (12x400 MHZ) 1.8 GHZ (11x166 MHZ) COMMENT - "The 2.4Ghz Athlon XP 2500 Mobile outperformed the 1.8Ghz Athlon XP 2500 by 15% with 3dmark 2001 SE, 20% with 3dmark 2003, 24% with Cpu Bench 2003 and 25% with Metabench." BENCHMARK SETTINGS 3DMARK 2001 SE 1024x768 Resolution 32Bit color D3D Hardware T&L Antialiasing Disabled Double Frame Buffer Compressed Texture Format 24Bit Z-Buffer Depth 3DMARK 2003 1024x768 Resolution No Pixel Processing Optimal Texture Filtering 4x Max Anisotropy Optimal Vertex Shaders No Repeat Tests No Fixed Framerate

GAME BENCHMARKS COMANCHE4 62 51 FARCRY 67 48 QUAKE 3 ARENA 313 260 UNREAL TOURNAMENT 2003 152 120 UNREAL TOURNAMENT 2004 125 96 X2 THE THREAT 97 83 2.4 GHZ (12x400 MHZ) 1.8 GHZ (11x166 MHZ) COMMENT - "The 2.4Ghz Athlon XP 2500 Mobile outperformed the 1.8Ghz Athlon XP 2500 by 8% with Comanche4, 29% with Far Cry, 17% with Quake 3 Arena, 22% with Unreal Tournament 2003, 24% with Unreal Tournament 2004 and 15% with X2 the Threat."