Athlon XP 2100+: AMD Turns Up The Heat

Benchmarks Under Windows XP

We performed a total of 20 different benchmark tests in order to obtain the most complete, well-balanced view of how the AMD XP 2100+ performs. You can get a clear overall picture from the benchmark results for a total of 23 different processors - we've included the figures from the last test of the Pentium 4 CPUs (2400, 2533 and 2666) as a quasi-reference. We compared this to all of the AMD Athlon XP processors, the classic Athlon with Thunderbird core to the slowest of all, the Athlon 850.

We ran four different Quake 3 tests to determine OpenGL performance. The different MPEG-encoding benchmarks provide a comprehensive testing environment - 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 commercial DVD-ROM into MPEG-4 format using Xmpeg 4.2a and the Divx 4.12 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). We also ran the new WinACE 2.1 to test how well the CPU performs when archiving files, a common application in the computing world. The Sysmark 2002 benchmark was used for the first time to determine office performance. The SPECviewperf benchmark offered a comprehensive 3D benchmark suite.