Like giddy
children on Christmas morning anxious to see what they got, Test Center engineers eagerly
unpacked TCE's 600MHz AMD K7, or Athalon system, curious about what they would find. Not
only did they find a well-configured system that is easy to service, they also recorded
some of the fastest benchmark scores ever observed in the Test Center. Engineers can
officially report that AMD's 600MHz K7 processor is a good deal faster than 600MHz Pentium
IIIs, and 650MHz units, which are already available, must be faster still. Supposedly,
AMD's future is riding on this new Athalon processor. AMD leapfrogged Intel this time,
skipping an entire CPU generation, and is going for broke with this blazingly fast chip.
Test Center engineers sincerely doubted that beating Intel in the CPU market was possible,
but only until they saw the performance scores. Now engineers feel that AMD does have a
chance of beating Intel, but only if the corporate world embraces AMD's new technology. It
can sometimes be risky for IT managers to purchase high-end systems that are not
Intel-based. But if the reviews remain positive over the next few months and no
incompatibility issues crop up, and if AMD's pricing stays in line with Intel's, AMD could
end up on top. Only time will tell.
TCE puts together a nice system. Aside from the AMD CPU, TCE's K7 system was identical
to its Pentium III 600 system, but with the addition of one more cooling fan necessary to
better meet the K7's cooling needs. TCE's tower system has a side panel that pulls off
easily after removing the case's front panel. Plenty of room for expansion exists in the
tower case, as it includes a total of four PCI slots and two ISA slots, one pair of which
share bracket space. The motherboard also features one AGP slot and three DIMM slots for
memory. The K7-600 system came equipped with 256 Mbytes of memory.
The AMD K7 CPU looks very much like an Intel Pentium II or Pentium III, and it installs
in a similar, though noncompatible slot--the motherboard is specific to K7 CPUs. The K7
even has similar tie-downs that hold it in place, but with the addition of two more
catches on the heat-sink side of the CPU. Engineers have more than once seen Pentium II
and Pentium III systems arrive where the CPU had fallen out of its socket, so the extra
tie-downs are good to have.
TCE outfitted the K7 system with two 18.2-Gbyte Western Digital UATA hard drives
arranged in a fault-tolerant RAID array driven by a PCI UATA-66 controller card. The
system also features a Kenwood True X 52X CD-ROM drive that reads multiple tracks at once
to get around the spin-speed barrier.
The K7 system included a Creative Labs 3Dblaster Riva TNT2 Ultra, which earned the
system the second highest OpenGL acceleration score of 49.34 weighted frames per second.
And now for the information you have been waiting for--the system performance scores.
The AMD K7 system came out on top as far as BAPCo SYSmark goes. In preparing this
article, engineers were ready to report that no system has ever broken 500 on the SYSmark
score. But that was only until the K7 system was tested. The first system to ever break
500 in the Test Center labs, TCE's K7-powered beast scored 524. This is a remarkable
score, and the new BAPCo reference point for Windows NT systems.
Also interesting is the fact that the K7 system beat all of the Pentium III systems on
the Bytemark benchmark, which allows performance comparisons to be made between different
platforms, such as PCs and Macs. As it turned out, the G3 Mac was about twice as fast as
any Pentium III system for integer-based performance, and about the same speed as the
fastest Pentium III at floating point performance. The K7 system turned out to be even
faster than the G3 for floating point performance, but only a bit faster at integer
performance.
TCE Athlon System