And now it’s high time we passed over to the performance of Athlon XP with 400MHz bus in real applications.

Well, no wonder happened in Business Winstone 2002 even after the shift to 400MHz bus. We can only see a slight performance increase caused by higher working core frequency. However, Athlon XP looks very good here even without 400MHz bus. The situation remains unchnaged: Pentium 4 CPUs with over 3GHz core frequency are defeated.

In the complex Content Creation Winstone 2003 benchmark the situation is different. Even Athlon XP (Barton) with 400MHz bus cannot outperform Pentium 4. However, the shift to faster bus does ensure about 5% performance growth.

During MP3 files encoding faster bus doesn’t matter for Athlon XP. This is a purely computational task, which doesn’t need any increase in the bandwidth between the processor and the memory. As a result, our hypothetical Athlon XP 3000+ with 400MHz bus falls a little behind the regular Athlon XP 3000+ with 333MHz bus because of its lower core frequency.

And for the algorithms used in the popular WinRAR archiving utility, the increase in the processor bus bandwidth is more than welcome. In particular, the shift from 333MHz to 400MHz bus provides about 12% performance growth. However, 800MHz of the new Pentium 4 and Hyper-Threading technology still help Pentium 4 3.0 to become the leader.

During MPEG-4 video encoding Pentium 4 processors are traditionally faster. The situation doesn’t change even when we take Athlon XP with 400MHz bus. The higher bus frequency doesn’t improve the performance at all here.

A similar situation can be observed during video encoding with Windows Media Encoder 9, although in this case the faster bus of Athlon XP processor tells a bit more on the overall performance.