SiSoft SANDRA 2005 Performance

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 test is the most popular section of the SiSoft SANDRA benchmark suite, and highlights the potential performance levels of the CPU-memory subsystem. As the Integer and FPU scores are quite similar, we are only including the first one in our benchmark suite.

In the PCMark04 and 05 Memory benchmarks, the AMD processors showed a nice lead over the Intel competition, and this trend continues with our SiSoft SANDRA 2005 testing. The scores are again influenced by clock speed, and we find the Athlon 64 X2 4600+ and 4200+ showing a slight performance lead over their Athlon 64 X2 4800+ and 4400+ Toledo competition. In this particular memory test, the Athlon 64 X2 models are the obvious winners, as even the 2.0 GHz Athlon 64 X2 3800+ outperforms the fastest Intel dual core processor.

ScienceMark 2 Performance

We have incorporated 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 depending on the platform and CPU, the actual tests can offer a slightly different result.

The ScienceMark 2 benchmarking shows much the same pattern as in our previous memory bandwidth testing, with the noticeable lack of clock speed as an influence on the score. Most of the Athlon 64 X2 processors perform at a similar level, as do the Pentium EE 840 and Pentium D models, with the noted exception of the Athlon 64 X2 3800+. In this case, it seems that dropping down to 2.0 GHz is a bit lower than the memory "sweet spot" for the Athlon 64 X2 core, and this is confirmed with larger-than anticipated drops in both of the PCMark Memory tests.

CINEBENCH 2003 Performance

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, can utilize multi-processing and Hyper-Threading.

CINEBENCH 2003 includes support for both multi-threading and Hyper-Threading, and this test should give us another view on AMD vs. Intel dual core performance. We anticipated the Pentium EE 840 would put up a good fight, and it did, but the 2.4 GHz Athlon 64 X2 4800+ and 4600+ were simply too much. The AMD advantage continued through the line, as the Athlon 64 X2 4400+ and 4200+ outperformed the Pentium D 840, while the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ outpaced both the Pentium D 830 and 820.

CINEBENCH 2003 also supplies a multiple rating for multi-threaded performance, and the Athlon 64 X2 dual core models offer a 1.8X to 1.9X increase over single core performance. The Pentium D posts a 1.7X dual core multiple, but due to its four logical processors, the Pentium EE 840 beats them all with a whopping 2.2X jump.