A New Kind Of Fast: AMD Athlon XP 2200+

32 Benchmarks Under Windows XP

We performed a total of 32 different benchmark tests in order to obtain the most complete, well-balanced view of how the new AMD XP 2200+ performs. We compared this to all of the AMD Athlon XP processors, the classic Athlon with the Thunderbird core and the slowest of all, the Athlon 850.

We ran four different Quake 3 tests to determine OpenGL performance - the 3D performance from the DirectX package is determined by 3D Mark 2000 (based on DirectX 7) and 3D Mark 2001 SE (based on DirectX 8). A newcomer to the bunch is one of the first games to support DirectX 8, Comanche 4. The different MPEG-encoding benchmarks provide a comprehensive testing environment - the Lame MP3 Encoder and mp3 Maker Platinum were 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 commercial DVD-ROM into MPEG-4 format using Xmpeg 4.5 and the Divx 5.02 Pro codec. We also created an MPEG-2 film using the video-editing software "Pinnacle Studio 7." A regular in our list of benchmarks is determining rendering performance using Newtek's Lightwave (version 7b), 3D Studio Max (version 4.2) and Cinema 4D XL 7.303. We also ran the new WinACE 2.11 to test how well the CPU performs when archiving files, a common application in the computing world. The Sysmark 2002 benchmark was used to determine office performance. The new SPECviewperf (version 7) benchmark offers a comprehensive 3D benchmark suite. And last but not least, we used the SiSoft Sandra 2002 Pro benchmarks as well.