Benchmark results
Memory performance

With unbuffered DIMMs, the Socket 939 processors are able to achieve higher bandwidth in our synthetic memory benchmarks than the Opteron 150/A64 FX-53. The margin of difference is small, but we have a new champ in Sandra's bandwidth test.

Linpack gives us a nice visual of the difference between the Athlon 64 FX-53 and the 3800+. The red line for the 3800+ starts to dip at around 512K, as its L1 data and L2 caches begin to fill up. The, er, lavender line for the FX-53 keeps chugging along to about 900K before it begins to slow down.

The Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, meanwhile, is just showing off.

Here we can see the latency benefits of unbuffered DIMMs. The Socket 939 processors match their single-channel Socket 754 brethren in memory access latency, shaving a few nanoseconds off the access times recorded for the Socket 940 chips. This is but one sample point, of course, but we can get a fuller picture...