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Review: AMD and DDR2: The AM2 Athlon
64s
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Synthetic Testing
Windows
Media Encoder 9 was used for SimHQ's content creation
test. The application is a free download from Microsoft and
greatly benefits from systems capable of accelerating its
multithreaded design. Falcon 4: Allied Force's intro movie,
a 91 MB AVI file, was converted into a WMV file with high
definition video and audio settings and the total time required
by each processor to convert the file recorded. Shorter conversion
times represent a better score for this particular test.
The two AM2 CPUs both outperform the
FX-60 by a noteworthy amount of time in this conversion test.
The FX-62 completed the task a full minute ahead of the FX-60
and the 5000+ by 30 seconds. In contrast, Intel's 955 took
an additional four minutes compared to the FX-60 to finish
the conversion, lagging behind by a significant margin. Both
the Intel and AM2 test systems used identical hard drives
and main memory, so the performance difference in this particular
test is truly noteworthy.
SimHQ also decided to throw somewhat
more extensive multitasking testing into the mix to see how
these dual core architectures differentiate themselves. Futuremark's
PCMark05 multithreaded
tests runs run multiple processes simultaneously, with Test3
running four separate threads (file compression and encryption,
a virus scan, and a memory latency test), making it a rather
strenuous multitasking scenario. The recorded score for each
processor is the geometric mean of the separate scores run
for each category, with a higher number representing a better
result.
The first two tests see all three
Athlon 64s outperform the 955, though only the FX-62 pulls
ahead by a truly significant margin. In contrast, Test3's
four concurrent threads see Intel's 955 lead the pack, most
likely due to the hyper-threading support in each core that
allows the part the ability to juggle four processes.
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