SiSoft SANDRA 2005 is the latest revision of this popular system benchmark, but it sticks to its roots and supplies a wide range of individual benchmarks and system utilities. These include processor, system, network, hard drive benchmarks and many other performance tests. The memory bandwidth tests is the most popular section of the SiSoft SANDRA benchmark suite, and highlight the potential performance levels of the CPU-memory subsystem.
The SiSoft SANDRA 2005 results are similar to what we found in the PCMark 2004 memory benchmarking, but there are some noted differences. The Pentium 4-3.73 GHz is obviously the top performer, and although the Pentium 4 670 does post the second-highest Intel score, it is still well back of the AMD Athlon 64 lineup. The GMA 950 graphics core does score a bit lower than with a dedicated PCI Express board, and the Pentium D 820 performs just as a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 would.
We have added the ScienceMark 2 memory benchmark to our suite, and more specifically the MemBench portion of the program. This high-end test utilizes a series of memory bandwidth algorithms, and then offers a measure of the overall memory bandwidth of a given CPU/memory/platform combination. In many ways, it is similar to SiSoft SANDRA in terms of output and format, but the actual tests can offer a slightly different result.
The overall results are a bit surprising, as both the Athlon 64 FX-55 and 4000+ manage to squeak by the Pentium 4-3.73 GHz EE running on the 1066 MHz bus. AMD's onboard memory controller obviously gets extra marks with ScienceMark 2, and the Pentium 4 670 is forced to take third among Intel processors, just behind the Pentium EE 840. The Pentium D 820, even though it's running at a significantly lower clock speed, manages to stay right with the rest of the 800 MHz Pentium 4 models.
CINEBENCH 2003 is a system benchmark that uses CINEMA 4D for both CPU and video-based testing. This benchmark processes a large, detailed image file on-screen, times the overall performance, and displays the results. As this is a processor review, we're concentrating on the CPU score, which incidentally, supports multi-processing/threading.
As CINEBENCH 2003 supports both multi-threading and Hyper-Threading, we expect the Intel dual core and HT enabled processors to come out on top. This comes out as expected, and the Pentium EE 840 posts a monster score, and is well ahead of any competition. The dual core power of the Pentium D 820 shows up in this benchmark, and pushes it ahead of even the 3.8 GHz Pentium 4 670 HT processor. In this case, two distinct processors, even at 2.8 GHz, offer higher multi-threaded performance than an HT segmented one.
