The Die Has Been Cast: Pentium 4/2533 vs. Athlon XP 2100+

Price Comparison: P4 Vs. Athlon XP

Benchmarks Under Windows XP

We performed a total of 25 different benchmark tests in order to obtain the most complete, well-balanced view of how the Pentium 4/2400 with 400 MHz and 533 MHz RDRAM performs. You can get a clear overall picture from the benchmark results for a total of 29 different processors - included are the Pentium 4/2533 and the Pentium 4/2666, the latter of which won't be introduced until another few weeks. We compared this to all of the AMD Athlon XP processors, from the classic Athlon with Thunderbird core to the slowest of all, the Athlon 850. A highlight is our "Athlon XP 2400+", which we simulated with an Athlon XP running at a clock speed of 1918 MHz.

We ran four different Quake 3 tests to determine OpenGL performance. The different MPEG-encoding benchmarks provide a comprehensive testing environment - mp3 Maker Platinum and Lame MP3 Encoder 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 5.01 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). Further 3D applications include 3D Studio Max 4.2, as well as Cinema 4D XL version 7.303. We also ran WinACE Packer 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 for the to determine office performance. Gaming performance under DirectX7 and DirectX8 were tested using 3D Mark 2002 and 3D Mark 2001. A newcomer is PC Mark 2002, which analyses the performance of the CPU and memory.