MP3, Raytracing, KribiBench, XviD
WAV crunchin' now.
Bandwidth and latency usually take a back seat to pure MHz here. It's of no surprise to see both the FX-51 and Model 3400+ tied. The FX-53 CPU is faster because it runs at a higher speed; it's as simple as that. Intel's Northwood CPUs demonstrate that high clock speeds can count for something, although imagine what a 3.4GHz AMD Athlon 64 FX CPU could do. Scary thought.
Once you factor in that an Athlon XP-M 2500+ can give a 3.4GHz Northwood Extreme Edition a very close fight in Realstorm's raytracing benchmark, it's not difficult to see why the FX-53 walks away with top honours. We can also see that, given an equal clock speed, the FX-51 is again faster than the Model 3400+. It should be - it costs almost twice as much.
KribiBench paints a different picture. The performance gap between FX-51 and Model 3400+ is surprising. Intel's trio show who's boss in this software rendering program.
Media encoding was undertaken using the XviD CODEC and the first vob of Sleepy Hollow's DVD. Bitrate is set to 1433Kbit/s and a 1-pass encoding with a 100% quality setting is used. The test was run twice to ensure consistency. FX-5x CPUs' bandwidth pays dividends here, and the 2.4GHz model comes very close to challenging the P4's superiority. The lack of a Prescott result was due to the sample having to be returned before the benchmark was introduced into the suite. A 3.4GHz version is on its way, though.
