X-bit labs

April Confrontation: AMD and Intel Start the Price War (page 5)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 03/28/2007 | 05:18 PM ]

Office Applications

Unfortunately, complex benchmarks modeling the user behavior in business and content creation applications, 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.

Core 2 Duo processors performed best in Word: they will be anyway slightly faster than AMD solutions with the same price tag. However, the situation changes as we get to the cheapest dual-core product range, where AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ and 3600+ outperform Pentium D CPUs.

In Excel the picture is pretty common: Core 2 Duo is several times faster than any other processor in our tests session, and that’s final.

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.

Nothing unexpected happens here. During data compression Core 2 Duo processors are ahead, while Athlon 64 X2 takes over the lead during data extraction from archive.

As a result, we can conclude that Core 2 Duo look more preferable for office applications when you selecting a CPU from over $100 price range. As for the cheapest dual-core solutions, AMD Athlon 64 X2 will offer the best performance.