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By,
Marco Chiappetta
January 6, 2004
Synthetic
benchmarks don't paint a completely accurate picture of
performance, so we put the Athlon 64 3400+ to the test in
some "real world" scenarios as well. For our first
real world test, we did some video encoding with all five of
the test systems. To get these scores listed below, we
took a 24MB, standard MPEG 2 format video clip and converted
it to DivX format using v5.1 of the CODEC with XMPEG v5.02.
The results are reported in Minutes:Seconds, lower numbers
equal better performance.
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XMPEG
Encoding Benchmarks
&
Comparisons |
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Video Encoding |
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As we've seen in
the past, the Athlon 64's larger cache don't give them a
significant advantage over the older Athlon XP 3200+.
The FX-51, Athlon 64 3400+ and Athlon XP 3200+ are clocked
at the same 2.2GHz, and their performances in this test are
very similar. The FX-51 finished just barely ahead of
the 3400+, followed by the XP 3200+. The Athlon 64
3200+ came in about 7 seconds behind the XP. The
3.2GHz Pentium 4, however, couldn't be touched. With a
time of 3:37 it was a full 14 seconds faster than the FX-51.
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ZD
Business & Content Creation Winstones |
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Simulated Application Performance |
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Next up, we used
ZD Labs' Business Winstone 2002 and Content Creation
Winstone 2002 benchmarks to test "Real World" performance
with some popular applications. We'll directly quote
ZD's eTestingLabs website for an explanation as to what
exactly these tests do to determine the final score:
"Business Winstone is a
system-level, application-based benchmark that measures a
PC's overall performance when running today's top-selling
Windows-based 32-bit applications on Windows 98, Windows
2000 (SP2 or later), Windows Me, or Windows XP. Business
Winstone doesn't mimic what these packages do; it runs real
applications through a series of scripted activities and
uses the time a PC takes to complete those activities to
produce its performance scores." (CC Winstone is comprised
of different applications, but uses similar scripted
activities)
Business Winstone 2002:
- Five Microsoft
Office 2002 applications (Access, Excel, FrontPage,
PowerPoint, and Word)
- Microsoft Project
2000
- Lotus Notes
- WinZip 8.0
- Norton Antivirus
- Netscape
Communicator
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Content Creation Winstone
2002:
- Adobe Photoshop
6.0.1
- Adobe Premiere 6.0
- Macromedia Director
8.5
- Macromedia
Dreamweaver UltraDev 4
- Microsoft Windows
Media Encoder 7.01.00.3055
- Netscape Navigator
6/6.01
- Sonic Foundry Sound
Forge 5.0c (build 184)
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The Business and
Content Creation Winstone benchmarks belonged to the Athlons,
hands down. In the Business Winstone tests, the Athlon
XP 3400+ came in just barely behind the dominant FX-51,
followed by the Athlon 64 3200+. The Athlon XP 3200+
performed well also, besting the 3.2GHz Pentium 4. The
performance landscape remained unchanged in the Content
Creation tests, with the P4 getting outperformed by the
Athlons, but the FX-51's 128-Bit memory interface, as
opposed to the "standard" A64's 64-Bit interface, helped it
surge way ahead of the competition.
SPECviewperf & 3D Rendering
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