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

We continued testing of the new AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 processor with a few more tests that are part of the Worldbench 5.0 suite. Up next we have some performance results of WB 5.0's 3Ds Max test (3D Studio Max) in Direct 3D mode. A number of different 3D objects are rendered and animated in this test, and the entire time needed to complete the tasks is recorded. As is the case with all of the individual Worldbench tests, a lower score here indicates better performance and faster completion times.

PC World's World Bench 5.0: 3ds Max More Real-World Application Performance

This test draws a nearly identical parallel to the Photoshop test in World Bench 5.  Everyone of the Pentiums are completely out-performed by the group of Athlon 64 processors, with spreads ranging up to a full minute slower between the fastest time put up by the Athlon 64 FX-57 and the slowest put up by the Pentium EE 840.  Also of note is that this test and application does benefit from dual-core CPUs since it is a multi-threaded application.  In fact the Athlon 64 FX-60 once again drops in right on top of the Athlon 64 FX-57, although the FX-60's cores are running a full 200MHz slower at 2.6GHz.  Here the FX-60 is the best of both worlds, a balance of very fast CPU clock speeds, with two cores at the ready for twice the compute resources.

Windows Media Encoder 9 Digital Video Encoding

For our next text, we moved onto a benchmark based on Windows Media Encoder 9.  PC WorldBench 5's Windows Media Encoding test reports encoding times in seconds, and like the tests in 3DStudio Max above, lower times indicate better performance.

This is really where the rubber meets the road in our opinion.  Media encoding is very much a mainstream function for today's modern PC user.  Converting video and audio streams to different formats is something "even your Dad" is capable of and may have use for.  Beyond word processing, web surfing and gaming, media encoding applications are probably the most widely utilized software on the market today.  Windows Media Encoder 9 is a multi-threaded  application as well and it benefits greatly from not only dual physical cores under the hood but also multiple logical threads being run on a single core, as with Intel's HyperThreading technology.

That said, Intel is very much served up a beating once again by AMD's fastest dual core processor, the Athlon 64 FX-60.  The FX-60 processed the WorldBench 5 workload some 50 seconds faster than the fastest Pentium EE 955 score and even the 2.4GHz Athlon 64 X2 4800+ blows by Intel's current best, in this test.  The EE 955 does have enough gas to take on the Athlon 64 FX-57, but at nearly a full 1GHz clock speed deficit, the FX-57 in turn takes out the 3.73GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, even with its HyperThreading technology at work.