X-bit labs

Core 2 Duo E6420, E6320 and E4400 Plus Another 15 Sub-$200 Dual-Core Processors (page 8)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 03/18/2007 | 07:30 AM ]

Office Applications

Unfortunately, complex benchmarks modeling the user behavior, such as SYSMark 2004 SE, do not work in Windows Vista. Therefore, we decided to estimate the typical office performance using the time it takes our test systems to resolve certain specific tasks. These tasks were the comparison of two versions of a large document in Microsoft Office Word 2007 and the calculation of a table with typical statistical operations in Microsoft Office Excel 2007.

Here Core 2 Duo processors perform phenomenally fast. Athlon 64 X2 can only compete against Intel Pentium D here, which by the way cost much less.

We have also tested the systems performance with the benchmark built into the 64-bit version of the 7-zip archiving tool. We looked at the archiving speed and data extraction from archives.

Two charts and two totally different pictures. Archiving is done best on Intel processors, while extraction of files from the archive is performed faster on AMD CPUs.