AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Dual-Core
Content Creation Winstone & WorldBench 5
To get this next batch of results, we used Veritest's Content Creation Winstone 2004 suite. Before running these benchmarks, we patched the program to its latest version (v1.01), shut-down any unnecessary background processes, and defragged the hard drive.
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The Veritest Content Creation Winstone 2004 test utilizes the following applications in its benchmark routine. For more information about this test, see this page:
- 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 Athlon 64 systems handily sweep this test, which is heavily dependant on raw CPU throughput as well as being multi-threaded . While some of its tests, like Windows Media Encoder, enjoy the benefits of multithreading and are heavily SSE optimized, other tests like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere and Dreamweaver, thrive on the high IPC of the Athlons in addition to the benefits of multi-threading and multi-core CPUs in some of the filter rendering operations for example. As you'll note in the scores of the Athlon 64 X2 versus its high-end sibling, the FX-55, it's clear that the Dual Core architecture has a considerable advantage, even in some of these more "legacy" code based applications.
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PC World Magazine's WorldBench 5.0 is a new breed of Business and Professional application benchmark, poised to replace the aging and no-longer supported Winstone tests. 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 Photoshop 7 and Office XP modules, recorded in seconds. Lower times indicate better performance.
The our WorldBench 5 Photoshop 7 test, clock speed plays a more significant role within the various architectures. Here again however, even though all of the Athlon 64s are running at clock speeds of almost a full 1GHz slower in some cases, it's a clear decisive victory for team AMD. The 3.73GHz P4 keeps pace to an extent but still falls behind the 2.4Ghz core Athlon 64 4000+ and even further behind the 2.4GHz dual core based Athlon 64 X2 4800+.
Although WorldBench 05 painted a bit of a different picture, the test was fairly nip and tuck overall, with the Pentium EE 840 and Pentium 4 Extreme Edition edging out the Athlon 64s. The fastest chip was the 3.73GHz Pentium 4 EE followed by the new Athlon 64 X2 4800+ but the variation between the fastest score we recorded here and the slowest was a mere 4%. These performance variances would be virtually undetectable to the end user in any of the Office XP applications.
