General Performance

We tested the general performance in office and digital content creation applications with the help of SYSMark 2004 SE benchmarking suite, which also uses multi-threading very actively.

The value AMD Opteron 165 performs up to its price-point during digital content creation. It is 5% faster than Pentium D 920 and 3% slower than the higher-speed and more expensive Pentium D 930.

You may feel quite skeptical about the results obtained in office applications. Pentium D 920 works faster in these applications than Opteron 165.

Audio and Video Encoding

During Video encoding into mpeg4 format with the DivX 6.1 codec Opteron 165 works almost as fast as Pentium D 920. I would like to point out that larger L2 cache doesn’t have any influence on the performance during video encoding. The performance difference between Opteron 165 and Athlon 64 X2 3800+ makes almost 10% in this case, which corresponds to the clock frequency difference between these two processors.

During video encoding into the new H.264 format in Apple Quicktime 7 we revealed that dual-core AMD processors are generally faster than the competitors. Opteron 165 outperforms Pentium D 930 even though it is still 10% behind the Athlon 64 X2 3800+.

The performance of Opteron 165 during sound files encoding into mp3 format corresponds to its price-point positioning. The CPU falls behind Pentium D 930, but outperforms Pentium D 920.