HARDOCP - Test Systems, Single Threaded Benchmarks

Date:: Monday , May 09, 2005
Author:: Kyle Bennett
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AMD Athlon 64 X2 Preview

A look at what AMD's new dual core 4800+ processor is going to bring to your computing table. We directly compare and contrast it with Intel's dual core Pentium Extreme Edition 840 in our basic benchmarks and real world heavy duty multitasking.

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Test Systems

AMD

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (2.4GHz Dual Core Processor), AMD Athlon 64 4000+ (2.4GHz Single Core Processor), ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe (BETA BIOS), GeForce 6800 Ultra (400/1.1) 61.45 & 71.89 drivers used, 2 X 512MB Corsair PC3200LL Pro DDR400 (2.2.2.5), 2 X Western Digital 36GB Raptor Hard Drives configured in a RAID0 array, Windows SP1 (single threaded benchmarks), SP2 (multithreaded benchmarks), nForce4 chipset driver v 6.53.

Intel

Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 840 (3.2GHz Dual Core Processor), Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz, ASUS P5WD2(i955X w/BETA BIOS), GeForce 6800 Ultra (400/1.1) 61.45 & 71.89 drivers used, 2 X 512MB Corsair PC5400UL Pro DDR2-666 (4.4.4.5), 2 X Western Digital 36GB Raptor Hard Drives configured in a RAID0 array, Windows SP1 (single threaded benchmarks), SP2 (multithreaded benchmarks), Intel chipset driver v 7.0.0.1019.

Single Threaded Benchmarks

Our benchmarks shown below are the "normal" benchmarks we use for motherboard and CPU reviews and articles. While these benchmarks do not exploit dual core processors to their full potential or even close, they still represent the vast majority of software currently being used today.

SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth Benchmark

AMD’s X2 memory bandwidth retreats very little compared to their FX and native Athlon 64 line with a solid score at the 5800MB/s mark. Intel’s bus design does seem to penalize them some in this department, but do keep in mind this is a synthetic benchmark that does more to test that everything is working properly.

WorldBench 2005

At first I figured this would be a benchmark we would leave by the wayside, but the AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ scored higher than any other processor we have ever seen. Click on the link above and you will see some multithreaded applications used in this benchmark as well as a small bit of multitasking.

DVD2AVI DivX encoder w/ codec 5.1.1

To be fair, this benchmark does not show Intel in the best light when it comes to DivX encoding. There are other front end applications besides DVD2AVI that do a much better job utilizing the Pentium’s power and in fact can show you flip flopped results.

That said, the real reason behind this benchmark is to show you just how little impact dual core solutions can have with some current software that you might think to take advantage of them. Here we notice no “real” benefit between dual core and single core processors. We will look at this more closely on our Multi Threaded Benchmark page.

3DMark 2001SE

As our gamers out there would suspect, the AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ simply destroys the Intel Pentium EE 840 in this benchmark. Even with their current flagship single core Pentium 4 at 3.8GHz, Intel is having trouble keeping up with AMD in the gaming department.