Price-performance Analysis
To arrive at a useful price-performance value we included the costs of a suitable platform in the calculation. We assumed the following costs:
| Header Cell - Column 0 | AthlonXP | Athlon64 | Athlon64 FX | Pentium 4 | Pentium 4 Extreme Ed. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost for motherboard and 512 MB memory | $200 | $250 | $350 | $200 | $350 |
Game Index
Based on our analysis (images per second per US dollar), it's abundantly clear that fast processors cost disproportionately more than the added performance they offer. The index is made up of the cumulative frame rates of our benchmark results playing Wolfenstein Enemy Territory, Unreal Tournament 2003 and Warcraft III that we then divided by the processor price.
Multimedia Workload
The multimedia workload is made up of the test results of the MainConcept (MPEG-2 encoding), XMPEG/Divx (MPEG-4 encoding), Lame (MP3 encoding) and WinRAR (data compression) benchmarks. For each CPU we consolidated all time units required and the time savings based on an AthlonXP 2600+ using the faster/overclocked models.