Hot Contraband: P4 With 3.6 GHz

Benchmarks Under Windows XP

We applied different benchmark tests to give an overall, balanced picture of the performance of the P4 processors that will be appearing over the next ten months. The benchmark results from a total of 35 different CPUs provide a more transparent overview. For the purposes of comparison, all AMD Athlon XP processors were included, as were the classic Athlon with Thunderbird core and the slowest contestant - the chronologically challenged Athlon 850.

We calculated OpenGL performance with four different Quake 3 tests - the Direct3D performance from the DirectX packet was gauged with the 3D Mark 2000 Pro (Version 1.1 and based on DirectX 7) and the 3D Mark 2001 SE (based on DirectX 8).

The various MPEG encoding benchmarks form a comprehensive test scenario: with the help of Lame MP3 Encoder and mp3 Maker Platinum, a 178 MB WAV file was encoded into MPEG-1 Layer 3 format. The MPEG-4 test is an established standard: it involves converting a file from a commercial DVD-ROM into MPEG-4 format using Xmpeg 4.5 and the Dvix codec 5.02 Pro. In addition, an MPEG-2 file is created using the Pinnacle Studio 7 video-editing software.

The standard repertoire also includes quantifying rendering performance with Lightwave from Newtek in its Version 7.5, 3D Studio Max Version 4.26 and Cinema 4D XL 7.303. Archiving is highly relevant in practice, and we performed this task with the new WinACE 2.2 packer.

We turned to the Sysmark 2002 benchmark to check office performance. A comprehensive 3D benchmark suite is supplied by the new Version 7 of the SPEC Viewperf benchmark. And, finally, we mustn't forget SiSoft Sandra 2002. The new versions of 3D Studio Max 5.0 and Pinnacle Studio 8.1 got to us too late to be included for testing purposes.