The Final Battle: P4/2400 vs. Athlon XP 2100+ (2400+)

Benchmarks Under Windows XP

We performed a total of 21 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 25 different processors - including the Pentium 4/2533 and the Pentium 4/2666, both of which won't be introduced for 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 the AMD Athlon XP 2400+, which runs 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 - 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 5.0 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 2.11 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 first time to determine office performance. The SPECviewperf benchmark offered a comprehensive 3D benchmark suite. A newcomer is PC Mark 2002, which analyzes the performance of the CPU and memory.