Results
Some sites run hundreds of benchmarks, this is something we have decided not to do, instead I have decided to stick to 4 core benchmarks for this review, SiSoft Sandra for CPU, Memory and Multimedia performance, SysMark 2001 for content creation and internet testing, and finally Madonion.com's 3DMark 2001, for high speed testing and graphics work. This will show you all aspects of the system from a business point of view; a gamer’s point of view, and a power user point of view.MadOnion.com 3DMark 2001 Professional Results
Here we see the XP1800 take a commanding lead of 1800 points over the Duron. The Pentium 4 2Ghz (18 x 111, result taken from MSI i850 review) takes 2nd place, just under 300 points behind. The XP1800 shows it's muscle and doesn't give any quarter to the bus overclocked 2Ghz Intel CPU. In truth, all 3 are good performers with even the lowly 1Ghz Duron not looking too shabby. However the 1553Mhz AMD processor is the one to look at here with outstanding performance.
BapCo/MadOnion.com SYSMark 2001 Results
This time, the P4 2Ghz claws back some ground on the XP1800 and draws level on 192 points with the Duron running 90 points back with 102. SYSMark2001 is a application level test and runs seperate Office Productivity and Internet Content Creation suites of tests, designed to guage typical application performance across a wide range of common Windows applications. The XP1800 and P4 2Ghz run neck and neck in this test and both give supreme performance on the desktop.
SiSoft Sandra 2001 Results
OK, onto the numbers that people can most relate to. We'll start of with the results for the Duron, P4 2Ghz and then finally our review CPU, the XP1800 in the CPU Benchmark.
Here we see the XP1800 take an approximate 10% lead in the ALU portion of the test, but in the FPU portion, the SSE2 on the P4 gives it an approximate 15% lead in that test.
Overall, fairly neck and neck with the Duron bringing up the rear with not too shabby numbers. Remember that Sandra is a synthetic bench and just use it as a straight CPU comparison and not much of an indicator of real world performance. It's worth noting that the XP's new Quantispeed enhancements give it a boost over a similarly clocked Thunderbird in Sandra.
Multimedia performance is much touted by AMD and Intel on their flagship processors so the CPU Multimedia benchmark in Sandra is a useful measure of their comparable performance. Remember that the Sandra bench uses 3DNow, SSE and SSE2 where available so unless all your apps use the special instructions, you can't judge overall performance from these marks, just the ideal multimedia performance from the processors.
The XP1800 takes close to a 7% lead in the ALU test and a 1.5% lead in the FPU test running SSE code (P4 ran SSE2). Impressive numbers from a CPU clocked 466Mhz lower and shows how the XP1800 makes up for in IPC what it loses in raw clock speed. The Duron can't really compete here and brings up the rear. Check out our 1Ghz Duron review here for a full discussion about that processors performance.
