AMD's Athlon 64 X2 4800+ & 4200+ Dual Core Performance Preview

Business/General Use Performance

Business Winstone 2004

Business Winstone 2004 tests the following applications in various usage scenarios:

. Microsoft Access 2002
. Microsoft Excel 2002
. Microsoft FrontPage 2002
. Microsoft Outlook 2002
. Microsoft PowerPoint 2002
. Microsoft Project 2002
. Microsoft Word 2002
. Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition 2003
. WinZip 8.1

When it comes to business appliccations, AMD has always dominated in performance and although their single core CPUs still remain at the top of the charts here, the Athlon 64 X2 is right on their heels.

Office Productivity SYSMark 2004

SYSMark's Office Productivity suite consists of three tests, the first of which is the Communication test. The Communication test consists of the following:

"The user receives an email in Outlook 2002 that contains a collection of documents in a zip file. The user reviews his email and updates his calendar while VirusScan 7.0 scans the system. The corporate web site is viewed in Internet Explorer 6.0. Finally, Internet Explorer is used to look at samples of the web pages and documents created during the scenario."

As we saw in Business Winstone 2004, there are definitely cases where there is no advantage to dual core.

The next test is Document Creation performance:

"The user edits the document using Word 2002. He transcribes an audio file into a document using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 6. Once the document has all the necessary pieces in place, the user changes it into a portable format for easy and secure distribution using Acrobat 5.0.5. The user creates a marketing presentation in PowerPoint 2002 and adds elements to a slide show template."

In our first look at Athlon 64 X2 performance, we saw some of the highest SYSMark 2004 numbers that we'd ever seen. Now with an actual Athlon 64 X2 4800+, we're breaking records once more - the two X2s are on top with no competition here.

The final test in our Office Productivity suite is Data Analysis, which BAPCo describes as:

"The user opens a database using Access 2002 and runs some queries. A collection of documents are archived using WinZip 8.1. The queries' results are imported into a spreadsheet using Excel 2002 and are used to generate graphical charts."

This is one test where the dual core AMD CPUs lose out to the dual core Intel chips. Note that the Pentium D 840 is priced close to the Athlon 64 X2 4200+, while the Extreme Edition 840 is a better match for the 4800+.

Microsoft Office XP SP-2

Here, we see in that the purest of office application tests, performance doesn't vary all too much.

Mozilla 1.4

Quite possibly the most frequently used application on any desktop is the one we pay the least amount of attention to when it comes to performance. While a bit older than the core that is now used in Firefox, performance in Mozilla is worth looking at as many users are switching from IE to a much more capable browser on the PC - Firefox.

All single-threaded tests will obviously favor higher clocked, single-core CPUs and thus, we see very little from the Athlon 64 X2 line here.

ACD Systems ACDSee PowerPack 5.0

ACDSee is a popular image editing tool that is great for basic image editing options such as batch resizing, rotating, cropping and other such features that are too elementary to justify purchasing something as powerful as Photoshop. There are no extremely complex filters here, just pure batch image processing.

Once again, single threaded applications won't show any benefit from a dual core platform.

Ahead Software Nero Express 6.0.0.3

While it was a major issue in the past, buffer underrun errors while burning a CD or DVD are few and far between these days, thanks to high performance CPUs as well as vastly improved optical drives. When you take the optical drive out of the equation, how do these CPU's stack up with burning performance?

As you'd guess, they're all pretty much the same, with the slight variations between chips falling within expectations. Any of these chips will do just fine.

Winzip

Archiving performance ends up being fairly CPU bound as well as I/O limited.

WinRAR 3.40

Pulling the hard disk out of the equation, we can get a much better idea of which processors are truly best suited for file compression.

Here, there's no difference between a dual core and a single core CPU of the exact same specifications, which is to be expected.