AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 And X2 5000+ Socket AM2, nForce 590 SLI & ATI RD580
WME 9 And Mozilla Multitasking
For our next test, we moved onto a benchmark based on Windows Media Encoder 9. PC WorldBench 5's Windows Media Encoding and Mozilla multi-tasking test reports encoding times in seconds, and like the tests on the previous page, lower times indicate better performance.
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In this test, a video is encoded using Windows Media Encoder, while an instance of the Mozilla browser is running and navigating through various cached pages. Because the system is multi-tasking with two different applications, this test is more taxing than just running one instance of WME.
It's amazing how the Athlon 64, no matter what the platform or on-chip cache size is, absolutely crushes the Pentium Extreme Edition 965 in this test. Intel has informed us that the reason for this large disparity could be caused by the older version of Mozilla that's used in the test and Windows not prioritizing workloads properly as a result. We haven't been able to prove this out either way but we do know Mozilla derivatives like FireFox are our the second most popular browsers after IE for our readership. Beyond that, memory latency and bandwidth is king in this test and the DDR2-800 speeds along with 2.8GHz clocks speeds of the FX-62 on NF590 or RD580, allow it to best all comers by a healthy margin - the NForce 590 offering a small edge even still.
We were still expecting more from the AM2 platform, however, when you consider the comparable FX-60 socket 939-based score in this test. In addition, smaller cache sizes of the 5000+ starve the processor a bit in this multi-tasking scenario as well and although it has an identical clock speed to the FX-60 nForce 4 system, it simply can't keep pace.
