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Intel "Pentium D" and "840 Extreme Edition" Dual-Core CPUs |
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More Benchmarking, Gaming Results
“Descreet 3ds max 7” is a 3D rendering application package. We ran several final rendering jobs and measured the time to finish the task. The results show that with a dual core CPU rendering performance is significantly increased. The 2.8 GHz 820 completes the final “Underwater” rendering almost 20% faster than the single core 3.0 GHz 630. Not surprisingly, a single core CPU without HT capability, the XP 3500+, is the slowest processor in this test. Rendering can obviously easily be split between multiple threads and the 840XE with 4 CPUs performs very well with this software running neck to neck with the X2 4800+.
Another such rendering application is “Cinebench 2003”. It includes a CPU benchmark test that allows running the test single and multithreaded. “Cinebench 2003” shows again that a dual core processor does not offer any advantage for a single threaded application: the 3.73 GHz XE is faster than all Pentium D including the 840XE because it is much higher clocked. But when the same rendering test is running multithreaded, even the lowest clocked dual CPU is faster. The “Cinebench 2003” multithread CPU test was previously dominated by HT capable P4, but now a dual core AMD processor, the X2 4800+, takes the overall lead.
We benchmarked MP3 encoding with the multithreaded version of “LAME 3.97”. The result table shows the encoding time for a 400 MB .wav file. The 2.8 GHz dual core 820 is around 10% faster than a single core 630, and the 840 is more than 10% faster than the 3.73XE.
Video encoding in XMpeg shows almost exactly the same picture: The dual core 2.8 GHz is 10% faster than the single core 3.0 GHz CPU, The dual core 3.2 GHz CPU outperforms the single core 3.73 GHz XE by around 10%. In both encoding applications the X2 4800+ performs again better than the 840XE. We also see no difference between the 840 and the HT enabled 840XE.
There isn’t much to say about Adobe’s well-known “Photoshop”. It’s the word’s most popular image editing software. We ran with each processor 8 pre-defined filters. The time shown in the “Photoshop” result table is the added up total time to complete all 8 filters. Photoshop is optimized for multiprocessor and HT technology and makes therefore good use of a dual core CPU. The dual core 2.8 GHz 820 outperforms the single core 3.0 GHz P4 630 by around 15%. The single core 3.73 GHz XE performs no faster than the 3.2 GHz dual core 840 and is a good 15% slower than the 840XE. The non-HT, single-core XP 3500+, shows unsurprisingly the worst performance in Photoshop. On the other hand AMD’s X2 4800+ takes again the overall lead.
Our gaming benchmarks are obtained with some of the currently most popular and demanding 3D games. All games were running in 1024 x 768 x 32 and highest quality settings. Whenever possible pre-defined benchmarks were used, such as an “Doom 3” time demo or the Splinter Cell “Lighthouse” benchmark. None of the 3D games we used for benchmarking supports multithreading. Consequently a dual core processor does not give an advantage when running these games. The only difference is, as we will later see, multitasking, when several applications are running as background tasks while gaming. As the current Pentium D are rather low clocked, their performance in these games is dismal.
AMD has been dominating gaming benchmarks since the release of the A64. Even a “lowly” single core XP 3500+ is outrunning the 840XE. AMD’s dual core X2 CPUs do not suffer from raw performance (as the Pentium D does), because AMD has based their dual core solutions on 2 of their higher clocked cores. And that shows when games are running. There isn’t much to discuss here. The obvious choice for a user who wants excellent gaming performance and at the same time dual core processing capability is AMD’s A64 X2.
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