Valve Hardware Day 2006 - Multithreaded Edition

Test Setup

Obviously valve is pretty excited about what can be done with additional processing power, and they have invested a lot of time and resources into building tools that will take advantage of the possibilities. However, Valve is a software developer as opposed to a hardware review site, and our impression is that most of their systems are typical of any business these days: they are purchased from Dell or some other large OEM, which means they are a bit more limited in terms of what kind of hardware is available. That's not to say that Valve hasn't tested AMD hardware, because they have, but as soon as they reached the conclusion that Core 2 Duo/Core 2 Quad would be faster, they probably didn't bother doing a lot of additional testing. We of course are more interested in seeing what these new multiprocessor benchmarks can tell us about AMD and Intel hardware -- past, present, and future -- and we plan on utilizing these tests in future articles. As a brief introduction to these benchmark utilities, however, we thought it would be useful to run them on a few of our current platforms to see how they fare.

In the interest of time, we did not try to keep all of the tested platforms identical in terms of components. Limited testing did show that the processor is definitely the major bottleneck in both benchmarks, with a variance between benchmark runs of less than 5% on all platforms. Besides the processor, the only other area that seems to have any significant impact on benchmark performance is memory bandwidth and timings. We tested both benchmarks three times on each platform, then we threw out the high and low scores and took the remaining median score. In many instances, the first run of the particle simulation benchmark was slightly slower than the next two runs, which were usually equal in performance. The variability between benchmark runs of the map compilation test was less than 1%, so the results were very consistent.

Here are the details of the tested systems.

Athlon 64 3200+ 939
CPU	Athlon 64 3200+ (939) - 2.0GHz 512K OC 3200+ @ 10x240 HTT = 2.40GHz
Motherboard	ASUS A8N-VM CSM - nForce 6150
Memory	2x1GB OCZ OCZ5001024EBPE - DDR-400 2-3-2-7 1T OC DDR-480 3-3-2-7 1T
GPU	X1900 XT
HDD	Seagate SATA3.0Gbps 7200.9 250GB 8MB cache 7200 RPM

Athlon X2 3800+ 939
CPU	Athlon X2 3800+ (939) - 2.0GHz 2x512K OC 3800+ @ 10x240 HTT = 2.40GHz
Motherboard	ASUS A8R32-MVP - ATI Xpress 3200
Memory	2x1GB OCZ OCZ5001024EBPE - DDR-400 2-3-2-7 1T OC DDR-480 3-3-2-7 1T
GPU	X1900 XT
HDD	Western Digital SATA3.0Gbps SE16 WD2500KS 250GB 16MB cache 7200 RPM

Athlon X2 3800+ AM2
CPU	Athlon X2 3800+ (AM2) - 2.0GHz 2x512K OC 3800+ @ 10x240 HTT = 2.40GHz
Motherboard	Foxconn C51XEM2AA - nForce 590 SLI
Memory	2x1GB Corsair PC2-8500C5 - DDR2-800 4-4-4-12 OC DDR2-960 4-4-4-12
GPU	X1900 XT
HDD	Western Digital SATA3.0Gbps SE16 WD2500KS 250GB 16MB cache 7200 RPM

Core 2 Duo E6700 NF570
CPU	Core 2 Duo E6700 - 2.67GHz 4096K OC E6700 @ 10x320 FSB = 3.20GHz
Motherboard	ASUS P5NSLI - nForce 570 SLI for Intel
Memory	2x1GB Corsair PC2-8500C5 - DDR2-800 4-4-4-12 OC DDR2-960 4-4-4-12
GPU	X1900 XT
HDD	Western Digital Raptor 150GB 16MB 10000 RPM

Core 2 Quad QX6700 975X
CPU	Core 2 Quad QX6700 - 2.67GHz 2 x 4096K OC QX6700 @ 10x320 FSB = 3.20GHz
Motherboard	ASUS P5W DH Deluxe - 975X
Memory	2x1GB Corsair PC2-8500C5 - DDR2-800 4-4-4-12 OC DDR2-960 4-4-4-12
GPU	X1900 XT
HDD	2 x Western Digital Raptor 150GB in RAID 0

Pentium D 920 945P
CPU	Pentium D 920 - 2.8GHz 2 x 2048K OC 920 @ 14x240 HTT = 3.36GHz
Motherboard	ASUS P5LD2 Deluxe - 945P
Memory	2x1GB Corsair PC2-8500C5 - DDR2-667 4-4-4-12 OC DDR2-800 4-4-4-12
GPU	X1900 XT
HDD	Western Digital SATA3.0Gbps SE16 WD2500KS 250GB 16MB cache 7200 RPM

We did test all of the systems with the same graphics card configuration, just to be consistent, but it really made little to no difference. On the Athlon 64 configuration, for example, we got the same results using the integrated graphics as we got with the X1900. We also tested at different resolutions, and found once again that on the graphics cards we used resolution seemed to have no impact on the final score. 640x480 generated the same results as 1920x1200, even when enabling all of the eye candy at the high resolution and disabling everything at the low resolution. To be consistent, all of the benchmarking was done at the default 1024x768 0xAA/8xAF. We tried to stay consistent on the memory that we used -- either for DDR or DDR2 - though the Pentium D test system had issues and would not run the particle simulation benchmark. Finally, to give a quick look at performance scaling, we overclocked all of the tested systems by 20%.

For now we are merely providing a short look at what Valve has been working on and some preliminary benchmarks. We intend to use these benchmarks on some future articles as well where we will provide a look at additional system configurations. Note that performance differences of one or two points should not be taken as significant in the particle simulation test, as the granularity of the reported scores is relatively coarse.