As with the 2400+ review, there have been so much info posted on these chips that there really is no point in digging into the specs and/or what makes the Athlon XP tick. If you really want to read dozens of pages of technical mumbo jumbo, visit the AMD website. Now let's get right to the testing!

Test System

     The test system I'll be using today is based on a new revision of the Soltek 75FRN-L nForce2 motherboard. I've retired the ABIT NF7-S because I have not had good luck with it in the overclocking department. So far, my early tests show this new Soltek board to do very well with overclocking. As for cooling, I'll be using the Cooler Master Heat Pipe on the CPU. This system is complimented by a matched pair of 512mb Corsair XMS3500 DDR Memory Modules. The system is also running SATA RAID with a pair of WD Special Edition 80gb hard drives with SATA converter cards. For a video card I'll be using the ABIT GeForce2 Ti4200-8X OTES. For benchmarking, I'll be sticking primarily with SiSoft Sandra, but I'll throw in a few other tests as well.

Testing

     First, let's take a look at what this CPU can do for us right out of the box.

(click on images for larger version)

CPUID

Sandra CPU Benchmark

Sandra Multimedia Benchmark

Sandra Memory Benchmark

RC5-72 Benchmark - 6,641,893 keys/sec