AMD and NVIDIA

This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective’s website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.

AMD had a fairly large presence at this year’s Quakecon, much more so than last year. And of course what did they use all the area to showcase: the new Athlon64 processor – sort of.

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Nearly every system that AMD was running at the show was being powered by an Athlon64 processor and NVIDIA chipset motherboard. AMD’s shining achievement was to secure the rights to power the tournament machines – each tourney at Quakecon was run on the Athlon64 platform and served on Opteron machines.

AMD also ran several contests throughout the show to give away processors, shirts and other accessories. Not to mention stick on Athlon64 tattoos. 🙂 One of the contests was for a talent show that involved some guys dressing in drag and dancing in the show floor…

I was also able to take a quick snap of an Athlon64 processor for the mobile platform. It is essentially the same CPU as a 754 pin Athlon64 processor, just without the heat spreader.

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NVIDIA

As this was a gaming show at heart, the main push behind NVIDIA’s presence at Quakcon was to drive up the hype on their GeForce FX line of graphics cards. But they also had some mainboards to show off as well for both the Athlon XP and the Athlon 64 lines.

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Most of what we talked about was under NDA for a while, but you’ll see a lot of it coming out on the Athlon 64 launch. What they did show me was a highly overclocked Athlon XP system. I didn’t get a picture, but the specs included an Athlon XP 3200+ processor, a Gigabyte nForce2 Ultra 400 motherboard, 1 GB of PC4000 memory, Serial ATA drive and more. What was impressive was seeing the motherboard and processor running at 500/500 bus and memory speeds and a 11.5x multiplier, for a frequency of 2.875 GHz!! The memory timings were of course very relaxed but the system was rock solid and benchmarks will be available soon.

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