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Luckily, as we
moved on past the Business and Content Creation Winstones,
the Athlon XP 2200+ began performing at the kind of levels
we expected. We did a little video encoding for the
next series of tests, with Flask and MadOnion's Video 2000.
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MPEG Encoding Benchmarks
&
Comparisons |
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Flask and Video
2000 Hard At Work |
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Flask MPEG is a
Digital Video Stream conversion utility that takes a video
of a certain file type, and converts it to another format.
We took a 19MB MPEG 2 video clip of Gomer Pyle,
that debuted in Davo's 533Mhz. BUS P4 review, and
converted it to DIVX format using the DIVX Pro 5.02 Codec.
From this point forward, we'll also be including the scores
from our AMD test system when overclocked to 1917MHz.
(13.5x142MHz.)
Are you
beginning to see a pattern here? At it's default
clockspeed (1800MHz.) the Athlon XP 2200+ just barely nudged
ahead of the 2.2GHz. P4. When overclocked to 1917MHz.,
the Athlon almost catches the 2.53GHz. P4.
MadOnion Video
2000's video encoding test shows a slightly different
result. At default speeds, the Athlon XP 2200+
performed very well, again besting the 2.2GHz. P4, and
falling only slightly behind the 2.53GHz. P4. At it's
overclocked speed though, the Athlon outperformed all of the
other systems. One point of reference with respect to
this test however, is that it is somewhat outdated.
The Athlon processor typically seems to handle legacy code,
not optimized for the newer processor architectures, a
little more efficiently than the Pentium 4.
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MadOnion PCMark 2002
Benchmarks
&
Comparisons |
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CPU and Memory
Scores |
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Next up is
MadOnion's relatively new PCMark 2002 benchmarking suite. PCMark 2002
is very simple to run, and produces repeatable results. We
ran their "CPU" and "Memory" performance modules, which
incorporate the following tests:
CPU Test:
Memory Test
Technical details: (Quoted)
"Raw read,
write, and read-modify-write operations are performed
starting from a 3072 kilobytes array decreasing in size to
1536 KB, 384 KB, 48 KB and finally 6 KB. Each size of block
is tested two second and the amount of accessed data is
given as result. In the STL container test a list of 116
byte elements is constructed and sorted by an integer
pseudo-random key. The list is then iterated through as many
times as possible for 2 seconds and the total size of the
accessed elements is given as result. There are 6 runs of
this test, with 24576 items in the largest run corresponding
to a total data amount of 1536 KB, decreasing in size to
12288 items (768 KB), 6144 items (384 KB), 1536 items (96
KB), 768 items (48 KB) and 96 items in the smallest run
corresponding to 6 KB of total data."
Anyone who took
issue with AMD when they went to a "performance rating"
scheme with the Athlon XP line of CPUs, has to admit that
AMD seems to have been really honest with their naming
convention. The 2200+ AMD CPU and 2200MHz Intel CPU,
perform at almost the exact same level in the PCMark 2002
CPU test. When we overclocked the Athlon, it obviously
surged past the P4 2.2GHz., but wasn't able to come close to
Intel's flagship.
PCMark's memory
bandwidth test really show the Pentium 4's strong point.
At both the default and overclocked speeds, the Athlon XP
2200+ couldn't perform at nearly the levels of the Pentium
4, whether we used DDR RAM on an i845 or RDRAM on an i850.
Gaming Scores and the Conclusion
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