Athlon Recharged

Last year, AMD was the Tiger Woods of the microprocessor world, repeatedly whipping veteran Intel in many performance tests. But this year, Intel has chipped away at AMD's advantage. As reported here last month, the most recent top Pentium 4 systems finally showed that they could beat the best Athlon XP PCs in PC WorldBench 4 speed tests.

That victory seems short-lived, however, as AMD has bounced back with its 1.8-GHz Athlon XP 2200+ chip. Our first WorldBench tests of four new AMD-based PCs found that the best Athlon XP units match high-end P4 systems in office productivity, though P4 models are solidifying their lead in audio and video tasks.

Nevertheless, AMD Athlon XP-based machines still win the value trophy--they usually cost $200 to $300 less than similar P4 models.

As you might expect, both Intel and AMD have surprises planned for later this year, so power fiends may want to wait a few months before buying. (See " Will AMD's Hammer Nail It?" for more on AMD's next-generation chips.)

Tale of Tests

PC World tests show that these days, choosing between top AMD and Intel-based PCs is almost all about money, not speed. Consider the two top-of-the-line, nearly-identical Polywell systems we tested: the $2150 Poly 883VF-2200, with an Athlon XP 2200+, and the $2480 Poly 850E-2530, with a 2.53-GHz Pentium 4.

The P4-based Poly earned a 122 score on PC WorldBench 4, a smidgen better than the Athlon-based Poly's score of 120. The $2099 ABS Awesome 3300 edged the rest of field with a 123 mark, indicating performance indistinguishable from that of the tested P4.

The two other Athlon XP 2200+ units' scores were in the same tight cluster: The $2996 Compaq Presario 8000Z earned a 122 mark; the $3485 Falcon Northwest Mach V Athlon XP 2200+, a 120. (All five PCs had at least 512MB of memory, NVidia GeForce4-based graphics with 128MB of RAM, and Windows XP Home.)

Results on multimedia and graphics tests were more variable. As we've often seen with Pentium 4 systems, the Poly 850E-2530 noticeably outperformed the four Athlon PCs on our audio and video encoding tests, doing particularly well on the Musicmatch Jukebox test. It also bested all but one of the Athlon units in Unreal game play (see the Test Report results).

However, the ABS system won the AutoCAD test by 25 seconds over the Pentium 4 Poly. That's notable, since this is the only test where the P4's 533-MHz frontside bus has distinguished itself in the past. All four Athlon PCs excelled on the two Photoshop tests.

Cache Questions

The Athlon XP 2200+ is manufactured using a .13-micron process instead of the .18-micron process used with prior Athlons. The new process is more cost-effective, and it produces cooler, more power-efficient chips, thus enabling faster successors without Texas-size heat sinks.

When Intel moved to the .13-micron process earlier this year, it raised the level 2 cache in its P4 chips from 256KB to 512KB. But AMD has chosen to make its new Athlon XPs with the same 256KB of L2 cache as the older chips. This helps explain why our Athlon XP 2200+ systems remain in rough parity with the tested P4 machine, rather than being well ahead. (As reported last month, Intel opted to release its recent 1.7-GHz Celeron with only 128KB of L2 cache to hit a lower price; the first PC we tested with this CPU was a mediocre performer.)

Cache isn't the only issue. The new Athlon has the same 266-MHz frontside bus as its predecessors; it's slower than the new DDR-333 memory and half the speed of the 533-MHz bus that the latest P4s use. Analysts say the slower bus hurts performance.

AMD says that a new Athlon XP chip, code-named Barton, shipping this fall, will have a 512KB L2 cache. But the company says it will not increase Barton's frontside bus speed, so it's unclear whether this chip will pull ahead of the P4. Meanwhile, predictably, Intel will hardly be standing still. The chip giant should be capable of shipping 3-GHz or even faster chips by that time, says IDC analyst Shane Rau.

But AMD won't stop with Barton. Hot on Barton's heels is AMD's eighth-generation family of chips, code-named Hammer, which will debut in late 2002. The first of these, a desktop chip code-named ClawHammer, will bear the Athlon brand name with an extension. Once the Hammer chips arrive, Athlon XPs will replace Duron chips in AMD bargain-level systems. Some Duron PCs will remain on the market in 2003, however.

Your Strategy

For now, your buying decision should be straightforward. Athlon XP 2200+ PCs like the ABS and Polywell units we tested save you a few hundred dollars over their P4 peers and offer loads of power for most standard tasks. (For more on the ABS unit, see this month's Top 15 Home PCs chart.)

The Falcon Northwest unit, stuffed with every goody that a power addict could covet--from 400-watt Klipsch speakers to two RAID-configured 40GB hard drives--may be overkill for most people, but you can scale down the package. For instance, a configuration with 512MB of memory, less fancy speakers, and no RAID storage costs roughly $2800, about $600 less than the tested unit. Similarly, the loaded $2996 Presario system costs $2607 with a 17-inch CRT monitor instead of our unit's 17-inch LCD screen.

And if you're an Intel fan, you need fret no longer that Athlon XP PCs leave P4s in the dust. In fact, the P4 retains its edge on multimedia tasks.

But as for who'll be atop the leaderboard at year's end, it's much too soon to guess.

SUMMARY

ABS Awesome 3300 Street: $2099

SUMMARY

Compaq Presario 8000Z Street: $2996

SUMMARY

Falcon Northwest Mach V Athlon XP 2200+ (Preproduction unit, not yet rated) Street: $3485

SUMMARY

Polywell Poly 883VF-2200 (Preproduction unit, not yet rated) Street: $2150