Performance

PCMark05, 3DMark06 and ScienceMark 2.0

First of all we decided to test the performance of our Opteron 165 using widely spread synthetic benchmarks.

PCMark05 test shows that Opteron is not only falling behind Athlon 64 X2 3800+, but also lags behind Pentium D 920. However, I wouldn’t be very much concerned with the results obtained in this benchmark, especially for the CPU test.

The PCMark05 is undoubtedly optimized for NetBurst architecture.

The new 3DMark06 test checking the system performance in contemporary gaming tasks places Opteron 165 slightly lower than the slowest dual-core Intel processor – Pentium D 920. This obviously results from the processor subtest scores.

Although if we recall the positioning from the price point for view, the performance of Opteron 165 processor should lie somewhere between the results of Pentium D 920 and Pentium D 930. And it is obviously not the case in 3DMark06. Our Opteron 165 yields a little bit to Pentium D 920. Of course, it is the low clock frequency that is to blame here, which can not even be compensated by larger L2 cache: Opteron 165 falls by about 7% lower frequency than Athlon 64 X2 3800+, while the difference in their clock frequency is 10%.

CPUs with K8 architecture cope much better with computational tasks than their competitors. According to the results obtained in ScienceMark 2.0, the performance of Opteron 165 exceeds the speed of a more expensive Pentium D 930 processor.