- VIA Arena Outpost SMP and 64-bit benchmarking

One of the problems faced by media today is the ability to demonstrate the true performance of 64-bit and SMP configurations due to a lack of mainstream benchmarks available to test these sorts of products on properly.

VIA Arena comes to the rescue today with a Jedi Knight Outpost map called VIA Arena Outpost and a program called GTK Radiant which complies a .map file into a playable .bsp file. Josh Holmes, the creator of the map, decided to make the original .map source file available for anyone to open in GTK Radiant and test how long it takes to compile the map on your PC.

Since GTK Radiant is CPU-hungry and SMP capable, it should prove to be an interesting benchmark for testing 64-bit and SMP products, such as VIA's K8T800 chipset and Dual Opteron processors. This will definitely be included in the follow-up to our preview of the VIA K8T800 chipset.

Due to the high level of geometric detail, lighting and special effects, the final version of the level took my old work machine (a single Athlon 2 gig system) two and a quarter hours to compile, which is a lot of downtime. Although that might not sound like much of a ball-breaker, consider that during the latter stages of optimizing the texturing, lighting effects and brushwork, a final compile was performed countless times. I would estimate that from the beginning of development to completing the project, my workstation spent well over a hundred hours compiling. This could have been significantly reduced had I been blessed with a dual CPU configuration at the time.

- nForce3 Pro Tested

Ryan over at AMDMB has posted an article taking a look at a reference nForce3 Pro motherboard with AMD Opteron processor at 1.4GHz in the socket.

Of course, the workstation applications have much more resemblance to the enthusiast market than the server applications, and thus we can use the Opteron 144 processor tested here to get a good look at how the upcoming Athlon 64 line might perform.

- Articles and Reviews from around the Web

- Chaintech 7NIF2 nForce 2 @ Viper Lair
- Cooler Master Aero 7+ @ X-Bit Labs
- Abit IC7-G Max II Advance @ GruntvillE
- Aopen AK77-600 MAX @ AMDZone