High-Flying: AMD Athlon XP 3200+ Squares Off Against Intel P4 3 GHz

Benchmarks Under Windows XP

We performed several different benchmark tests in order to obtain the most complete and well-balanced view of how the AMD XP 3200+ performs. The benchmark results provide a clear overview of the tested different CPUs.

In this description, you will see that many things have changed in the benchmark tests. OpenGL performance was measured by five different Quake 3 tests - Direct3D performance from the DirectX package was measured by 3D Mark 2001 SE (based on DirectX 8). Nor did we forget Unreal Tournament 2003 and Comanche 4, both established 3D games for DirectX 8. A new 3D game in our portfolio is Splintercell.

The different MPEG-encoding benchmarks provide a comprehensive testing environment: "mp3 Makers Platinium" was used to encode a 178 MB WAV file into "MPEG-1 Layer 3 format." A newcomer to the test is Xmpeg, version 5.0b, with the DivX codec 5.05. We also converted a DV video (1.2 GB) into an MPEG-2 file using Main Concept 1.3. Additionally, we created an MPEG-2 file using the latest version of the entry-level video-editing software "Pinnacle Studio 8.5."

A regular in our list of benchmarks is determining rendering performance using Newtek's Lightwave 7.5, 3D Studio Max 5.1 and Cinema 4D XL 8.1. The latter of these software packages has just been updated; we have incorporated the latest version. We also ran the new Winrar 3.11 archiver to test how well the CPU performs when compressing files, a common application in the computing world.

The Sysmark 2002 benchmark was used to determine office performance. SiSoft Sandra 2003 SP1 was another standard in our benchmark repertoire. PC Mark 2002 is of interest to overclockers in particular in finding comparison values for overclocking performance.