AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 & 3800+: Socket 939 Has Arrived

Synthetic and game benchmarks only tell part of the performance story, so we took the Socket 939 Athlon 64 FX-53 and 3800+ to task in some "real world" scenarios as well.  For our first set of real world tests, we did some benchmarking with Ziff Davis' Business Winstone 2004 suite, followed by the more demanding Content Creation Winstone 2004 suite.

Business & Content Creation Winstones Real-World Application Performance

The PC Magazine Business Winstone 2004 test utilizes the following applications in its benchmark.

• Microsoft Access 2002
• Microsoft Excel 2002
• Microsoft FrontPage 2002
• Microsoft Outlook 2002
• Microsoft PowerPoint 2002
• Microsoft Project 2002
• Microsoft Word 2002
• Norton Antivirus Professional Edition 2003
• WinZip 8.1

NVIDIA's nForce 3 chipset helps the Socket 940 Athlon 64 FX-53 score a victory in the Business Winstone tests, with the Socket 939 CPUs riding along on VIA's K8T800 chipset finishing in second and third place, respectively.  The FX-51 finished in fourth, followed by the Intel powered systems and last but not least, the Athlon 64 3400+.

The PC Magazine Content Creation Winstone 2004 test utilizes the following applications in its benchmark.

• Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1
• Adobe Premiere 6.50
• Macromedia Director MX 9.0
• Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 6.1
• Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9 Version 9.00.00.2980
• NewTek's LightWave 3D 7.5b
• Steinberg WaveLab 4.0f

The scales tipped heavily in favor of the Socket 939 Athlon 64s in the Content Creation 2004 benchmark.  With a score of 37, the Socket 939 Athlon 64 FX-53 outpaced the fastest Intel CPU, the 3.4GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, by approximately 10.7%.  The 3800+ also beat the 3.4GHz P4 E.E. by over 10%.  In fact, the only Athlon 64 that Intel was able to compete with in this test was the 3400+, and even then the P4 EE only won by small margin...