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Product: Athlon XP 2200+
Company: AMD
Website: http://www.amd.com
Estimated Street Price: $249.00
Review By: Julien Jay

Applications Benchmarks

Table Of Contents

1: Introduction
2: CPU Overview & Overclocking
3: Synthetic Benchmarks
4: Games Benchmarks
5: Applications Benchmarks
6: Conclusion

Business Winstone is a system-level, application-based benchmark that measures a PC's overall performance when running today's top-selling Windows-based 32-bit applications on Windows 98 SE, Windows NT 4.0 (SP6 or later), Windows 2000, Windows Me, or Windows XP. Business Winstone doesn't mimic what these packages do; it runs real applications through a series of scripted activities and uses the time a PC takes to complete those activities to produce its performance scores.

For our tests we used ZD Business Winstone 2001 1.02. The results of this test are quite disapointing for the AMD Athlon XP 2200+. The most powerful AMD processor only manages to beat the entry level Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz processor. Otherwise every Intel processors are faster than both Athlon. The results of the Athlon are probably crippled down by the 256KB limited L2 cache memory while Intel processors featuring the Northwood core have 512KB of L2 cache memory. Anyway the Pentium 4 2.53GHz is 25% faster than the Athlon XP 2200+ and 29% faster than the Athlon XP 2000+. The Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz outclasses the Athlon XP 2200+ by 13%.

Content Creation Winstone 2002 is a system-level, application-based benchmark that measures a PC's overall performance when running top, Windows-based, 32-bit, content creation applications on Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, or Windows XP. Following the lead of real users, Content Creation Winstone 2002 keeps multiple applications open at once and switches among those applications. Content Creation Winstone 2002 is a single large test that runs the above applications through a series of scripted activities and returns a single score. Those activities focus on what we call "hot spots," periods of activity that make your PC really work--the times where you're likely to see an hourglass or a progress bar.

For our tests we used Content Creation 2002. Just like with the Ziff Davis Business Winstone 2001 test, the Pentium 4 2.53GHz is on top of the race. It overtakes the Athlon XP 2200+ by 21% and the Athlon XP 2000+ by 23%. The Pentium 4 2.0a GHz beats the Athlon XP 2000+ by 2% while the Pentium 4 2.2GHz beats the Athlon XP 2200+ by 5%

SYSMark 2002 remains an essential and very good benchmarking tool that is definitely not biased. SYSmark 2002 is meant for the serious benchmarking professional. It includes a robust set of 14 application benchmarks covering a wide range of Internet Content Creation and Office Productivity application categories. The applications emulate usage patterns of today's desktop business user that includes concurrent execution of applications. The results above speak for themselves, but let me comment them.

In this test the winner is... well try to guess... the Pentium 4 2.53GHz, yes! Intel's latest monster outperforms AMD Athlon XP 2200+ by 41%. No, there's no typo you have correctly read the percentage. Even with the considerable advantage of having 512MB of RAM instead of 256MB for the Intel platforms, the Athlon XP 2200+ drags along. Such a difference between Intel and AMD processors can be explained by the presence of 512KB of L2 cache memory in Pentium 4 processors (against 256KB in Athlon) as well as the use of Rambus memory. Indeed the PC1066 Rambus memory teamed up with the 533MHz Front Side Bus of the Pentium 4 is able to offer a wide bandwidth required by today's most demanding applications. The Pentium 4 2.2GHz beats the Athlon XP 2200+ by 22%. Nonetheless the Athlon XP 2200+ outclasses the Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz by 10%.

« Games Benchmarks

Conclusion »