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By, Marco Chiappetta
May 13, 2003
For our next test, we took a 20MB MPEG video file and converted it to DivX format using a program called XMpeg. Performance in this test is influenced heavily by overall system bandwidth, which is generally the Pentium 4's strong suit...  | | XMPEG Encoding Benchmarks & Comparisons | | Video Encoding | | Both of the Pentium 4 test systems simply crushed the Athlons in the video encoding test, regardless of bus speed. Hyper-Threading and increased memory bandwidth give the Pentium 4s a huge lead here, with the P4 3.0C outperforming the Athlon XP 3200+ by 43%. The 3200+'s faster bus and higher clock speed give it a 9% edge over the 3000+, but it's going to take more than that to hang with Intel's top dogs in this test. | | | ZD Business & Content Creation Winstones | | Simulated Application Performance | | Next up, we used ZD Labs' Business Winstone 2002 v1.0.1 benchmark to test "Real World" application performance. We'll directly quote ZD's eTestingLabs website for an explanation as to exactly what this test does:
"Business Winstone is a system-level, application-based benchmark that measures a PC's overall performance when running today's top-selling Windows-based 32-bit applications on Windows 98, Windows 2000 (SP2 or later), Windows Me, or Windows XP. Business Winstone doesn't mimic what these packages do; it runs real applications through a series of scripted activities and uses the time a PC takes to complete those activities to produce its performance scores."
The Business Winstone tests include: -
Five Microsoft Office 2002 applications (Access, Excel, FrontPage, PowerPoint, and Word) -
Microsoft Project 2000 -
Lotus Notes -
WinZip 8.0 -
Norton Antivirus -
Netscape Communicator The Athlon XP excels when running x86 code that is not specifically optimized for the Pentium 4, which is one of the reasons it does so well in this test. The Athlon XP 3200+ posted the best Business Winstone 2002 score we have ever seen from a non-overclocked system, besting Intel's flagship part by about 8% and the 3000+ by 6.3%. We also ran some tests with ZD's Content Creation Winstone 2002 v1.0.1. This benchmark runs a series of scripted activities similar to the Business Winstone tests, but the applications are far more intensive and "bandwidth hungry". The applications used in the Content Creation Winstone 2002 tests include: -
Adobe Photoshop 6.0.1 -
Adobe Premiere 6.0 -
Macromedia Director 8.5 -
Macromedia Dreamweaver UltraDev 4 -
Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 7.01.00.3055 -
Netscape Navigator 6/6.01 -
Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 5.0c (build 184) If you thought the Athlon XP 3200+ performed well in the Business Winstone tests, you'll be doubly impressed by what you see here. The 3200+ smoked all of the other systems by 8% - 30% margins, once again posting the highest score we have seen to date. Athlon XP processors in general have always performed well in this test. The 3200+ is no different, with its faster system bus and higher clock speed it certainly didn't disappoint. SPECviewperf & Some Gaming Scores | 
