Speed Isn't Everything: P4/2800 Meets Athlon XP 2600+

Archiving: WinACE 2.2

Archiving data is a very practical application. With the help of the new WinACE 2.11 packer under Windows XP, a 178 MB WAV file was packed while the clock was running. Here, the Athlon XP 2600+ clearly lags behind the Pentium 4/2800, and there's about a 30-second difference between the two! This benchmark is very dependent on the performance of the memory interface, therefore the test scores for the overclocked Athlon CPUs (XP 3000+ and XP 3400+) are quite low. The reason for this is that, at high memory clock rates, the motherboard switches over to the slower CL3 mode. Here, it is not possible to manually set it to CL2.0.

3D-Rendering: Newtek Lightwave 7.5

In the Lightwave benchmark, the optimizations for the Pentium 4 processors become particularly noticeable - the Athlon XP 2600+ lands mid-field. Even high clock speeds of up to 2666 MHz don't help.