Performance in Office and Content Creation Applications

The testing methodology remained unchanged. As usual, we used Winstone benchmarks here:

Business Winstone 2002 emulates the everyday work of an office computer. This benchmark measures the performance in multi-task mode, when you simultaneously run a word processor, work with tabled data, create presentations, check your e-mail, run antivirus software, etc. In this type of tasks AMD processors have always been very successful, and this time was no exception, of course. Although Athlon 64 3200+ fell a little bit behind Athlon 64 FX-51 and even Athlon XP 3200+, because these two processors work at higher clock frequency, and faster memory subsystem doesn’t actually matter that much in this sort of applications.

The second test, Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2003 emulates workstation mode for audio, video and image processing. Here the leadership belongs to Pentium 4 CPUs, because their architecture is better suitable for streaming data processing. As for Athlon 64 3200+, it is considerably ahead of the Athlon XP 3200+ due to faster memory subsystem, SSE2 instructions support and larger L2 cache. However, it falls behind AMD CPUs with a dual-channel memory controller, namely Athlon 64 FX-51 and Opteron 146.

Performance in data Encoding Applications

Data compression with WinRAR archiving utility requires high-speed memory subsystem. Therefore, Athlon 64 3200+ featuring a single-channel memory controller manages to outpace only Athlon XP 3200+ here, which performance is severely limited by a pretty narrow processor bus.