|  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.  | | MPEG Encoding Benchmarks & Comparisons | | Flask and Video 2000 Hard At Work | | 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 One point of reference with respect to this test however, is that it is somewhat outdated.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.
| | | MadOnion PCMark 2002 Benchmarks & Comparisons | | CPU and Memory Scores | | 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 | 
