To our great disappointment, we didn’t manage to run Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2003 test on the Athlon 64 based system. During this test the same error kept popping up, though it had luckily nothing to do with the problems of the tested platform.

AMD is not very enthusiastic about SYSmark2002 benchmark, believing that the testing algorithms used in it favor the competitor’s products. Maybe it is true. What is worth your attention here, however, it’s the continuing lag of the Athlon 64 behind Athlon XP of the same rating. But here it is not such a big lag, actually, as the one we saw in Business Winstone 2002. Our hero is only 2-3% behind Athlon XP 2800+.

During mp3 encoding with lame codec the new Athlon 64 suffers a complete failure. Sound files encoding is a task that requires high “pure” CPU performance, which is a problem for Athlon 64 because of its low core clock frequency. So, as you may see on the diagram, the result shown by Athlon 64 2800+ is close to that of Athlon XP 1.6GHz.

And during data compression with WinRAR utility, Athlon 64 shows its best. Due to a large cache, which can save the biggest part of the dictionary, and also low memory subsystem latency, Athlon 64 2800+ easily outperforms not only Athlon XP 2800+, but even Intel Pentium 4 2.8C with 800MHz bus and Hyper-Threading technology.

Video encoding into mpeg-4 format again changes the whole picture. Hyper-Threading technology allows Intel Pentium 4 2.8C to get ahead of the racers. While Athlon 64 2800+ is again behind Athlon XP 2800+, though only a little bit this time.

Windows Media Encoder 9 is not the best application for Athlon 64. Its performance here is close to that of Pentium 4 2.53GHz, which can hardly be called a great achievement.