AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 - Finally, An Enthusiast's Dual Core

PC World Magazine's WorldBench 5.0 is a new breed of Business and Professional application benchmarks. We've made the jump from our aging Winstone tests, to this more updated suite of benchmarks with much more up-to-date applications incorporated within it.  WorldBench 5.0 consists of a number of performance modules that each utilize one, or a group of, popular applications to gauge performance.  Below we have the results from WB 5's Office XP SP2 and Photoshop 7 modules, recorded in seconds.  Lower times indicate better performance to completion of run-time workloads.

PC World's World Bench 5.0: Office XP SP2 & Photoshop 7 Modules More Real-World Application Performance

Worldbench 5.0's Office XP SP2 performance module reports all of the competitive CPUs and test systems here as finishing the workload within a few seconds of each other.  Regardless there are a couple of observations to be made.  Clearly Microsoft Office XP doesn't benefit much in this test from dual core CPUs and multi-threading.  The Athlon 64s  put up some of the fastest times in the field but not by much, and amongst each other, the faster the clocks speed, the better the score.  The same can be said for the Intel processors as well, with the 3.73GHz single core Pentium 4 Extreme Edition putting up the best time for the Intel camp.

The Photoshop 7 test is somewhat more taxing, but it too isn't completely multi-threaded, save for a few of the filters applied at various points during the benchmark. The Athlon 64 FX-57 is the best performer here by a hair but the Athlon 64 FX-60 clips right in behind it literally 1 second later, which is virtually an identical score considering the error variance of the test.  The fastest Intel-based time, put forth by the Pentium Extreme Edition 955, is smoked by 47 - 48 seconds, or about 17%, by both the Athlon 64 FX-60 dual core CPU and the single core FX-57.