The picture shows the test system set-up for all the AMD Athlon XP processors.

The picture shows the test system set-up for all the Intel Pentium 4 processors.

Benchmarks: 19 Rigorous Tests

Since we want to convey the widest spectrum possible of practical benchmarks, we performed all the tests under Windows XP and completely re-configured the tests. In total, we used 19 different benchmarks in order to obtain the most complete, the most well-balanced view of how each individal AMD and Intel processor performs. We continued to determine OpenGL performance using four different Quake tests - Direct3D performance from the DirectX package is determined using the 3D Mark 2000 (Direct X 7) and the 3D Mark 2001 (DirectX8). The different MPEG-encoding benchmarks portray a comprehensive testing scenario - the Lame MP3 Encoder was used to encode a 178 MB Wav file into "MPEG-1 Layer 3 Format." Still a classic, our MPEG-4 test converts a file from a DVD film into MPEG-4 format using Flask Mpeg and DivX codec. A new addition to our benchmark suite is MPEG-2 file encoding using the video editing software "Pinnacle Studio 7."