We used a total of 28 different benchmark tests in order to give you a complete and balanced picture of what the new Athlon XP 2600+ can do. The benchmark results, from a total of 31 different CPUs, provide a general overview. As a comparison, all AMD Athlon XP processors, the classic Athlon with the Thunderbird core, and the slowest Athlon 850 are also included.

The OpenGL performances are evaluated using various Quake 3 tests - the Direct3D performance from the DirectX package is measured with 3D Mark 2000 (based on DirectX7) and 3D Mark 2001 (based on DirectX 8). A relative newcomer is the first game with DirectX 8 support: Comanche 4. A comprehensive test scenario is created by a variety of benchmarks for MPEG encoding - with the help of the Lame MP3 Encoder, a 178 MB WAV file is converted to the MPEG-1 Layer 3 format. One of the established standards is our MPEG-4 test, in which data from a commercial DVD-ROM is converted into MPEG-4 via Xmpeg 4.5 and the codec DivX 5.02 Pro. In addition, an MPEG-2 file is created with the video editing software Pinnacle Studio 7. Part of our standard repertoire is the professional Lightwave package version 7b from Newtek, used to evaluate rendering performance. Also important for practical applications is data-packing, for which we use WinACE-Packer 2.11. In order to test office performance, the Sysmark 2001 benchmark is used. A comprehensive 3D benchmark suite is provided by the new SPEC Viewperf 7. And last but not least, SiSoft Sandra 2002 Pro should be mentioned. The new versions of 3D Studio Max 5.0 and Pinnacle Studio 8.1 arrived at our lab too late, so we were unable to include them in the test.