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.
