Testing of the Opteron system was an interesting process, I fully expected it to perform worse in “home use” than the Barton 3200+ it was being tested against. It had quite a few things against it, clock speed deficit and slower memory being the two most important.

Before we talk about the results and our final opinions on them I’d just like to make further comment on the installation and general stability of the setup. Installation was so easy, mainly due to the excellent heatsink attachment method, changing CPU/building your own PC is something that is very easy now for people, as the same method is used for socket 940 and 754 this means all of the new AMD processors will be easy to install, a great selling point. From the beginning to the end of the review the system was 100% stable, I noticed no strange quirks, and there were no crashes or concerns at all. Considering how new this architecture is I was thoroughly impressed. CPU temperatures were also very stable, considering the cooler used was a 2500rpm Silentboost the average temperature for desktop use was 38oC/100oF and in heavy benchmarking this raised to around 45oC/113oC, some excellent figures. (Coolermaster/ShinEtsu Premium thermal compound was used). If you were to add a more powerful cooler this would only improve.

Performance was phenomenal now that I look back at the results being achieved in the tests, the 43fps and 15fps increases in Unreal Tournament 2003 were outstanding, and the difference in Aquamark 3 was also significant proving that the Opteron can be a great processor to base a gaming system round. Looking at the PC Mark 04 results, despite the overall score being reasonably close the memory and individual tests show a large gap in performance over the Athlon XP. General tasks like XP startup and Virus Scanning are given huge speed increases, less waiting around on your PC doing things is always a good thing. The choice by AMD to integrate the memory controller on the Opteron, and make it dual channel has paid off hugely. Despite the fact that we were using ddr266 and 333 on the Opteron and ddr400 on the Athlon XP the Opteron memory benchmarks just blew the Athlon away.

At this time I can’t fault the Opteron 146, it is a great chip for the gamer and home user especially if you need that bit of extra power and considering that performance can only improve when 64bit support is added to Windows things can only get better for the Opteron.