X-bit labs

AMD Athlon 64 3400+ CPU Review (page 6)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 01/05/2004 | 10:05 PM ]

Performance in Office and Digital Content Creation Applications

As usual, here we are going to share the results obtained in Winstone test packages. Now we are using newer versions of these benchmarks released in the end of 2003. They are Business Winstone 2004 and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004.

Business Winstone 2004 is a benchmark, which shows the average performance of the tested platforms during work in regular office applications. The test imitates the everyday work of an average user in a bunch of widely spread programs and displays the result basing on the time it took the programs to complete the tasks. The list of applications used in this benchmark for proper performance analysis is pretty long and includes Microsoft Access 2002 SP-2, Microsoft Excel 2002 SP-2, Microsoft FrontPage 2002 SP-2, Microsoft Outlook 2002 SP-2, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002 SP-2, Microsoft Project 2002, Microsoft Word 2002 SP-2, WinZip 8.1 SR-1 and Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition 2003.

Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 is very similar to Business Winstone 2004, however, it uses absolutely different applications. All of them are intended for creation and processing of images, audio and video streams. The complete list of applications includes a number of popular and widely spread professional tools, such as Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1, Adobe Premiere 6.50, Macromedia Director MX 9.0, Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 6.1, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9 Version 9.00.00.2980, NewTek LightWave 3D 7.5b and Steinberg WaveLab 4.0f.

In both benchmarks Athlon 64 processors win the race, having left the regular Pentium 4 as well as its Extreme Edition counterpart far behind. Just like in the gaming benchmarks, Athlon 64 3400+ and Athlon 64 FX-51 again perform close to one another, balancing the scale to one or another side, depending on the way the applications included into the test package react to the two key parameters of the memory subsystem: latency and bandwidth.