AMD Phenom 9900 Performance Preview - Page 3

PCMark05 Pro Performance

PCMark05 Professional is one of the popular PCMark system benchmark series from FutureMark, and is revamped to highlight current hardware and features additional multithreaded and multi-tasking performance tests. There is the usual selection of individual System, CPU, Memory, Graphics, and Hard Drive benchmark suites, and these continue to bridge the gap between synthetic and application-based benchmarks. For our purposes, the System, CPU and Memory areas will be where we concentrate our benchmarking efforts.

The PCMark05 System benchmark suite includes a wide range of tests, from Windows XP hard drive startup to video and audio encoding, and features a selection of standard desktop routines like text edit, virus scanning, and image decompression. Three of the benchmark scenarios are multithreaded, with the first two including two simultaneous tests, and the final one utilizing four program tests running simultaneously. This helps make the PCMark05 System benchmark a great analysis tool for our dual and quad core processors. For this test, the latest 1.2 patch has been applied.

The Phenom 9900 starts off on a positive note in PCMark05 System benchmarking, posting a score about on par with the 2.66 GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6700, and ahead of the 2.4 GHz Core 2 Quad Q6600. The Phenom 9900 also shows a nice performance jump compared to the Athlon 64 X2 processors, and even the baseline 2.2 GHz Phenom 9500 posts a higher score than the 3.0 GHz Athlon 64 X2 6000+.

The PCMark05 CPU benchmarking doesn't go off as well, and the Phenom 9900 falls just behind the Core 2 Quad Q6600, while still offering a nice performance boost compared to the Athlon 64 X2 models.

The PCMark05 Memory testing doesn't exactly show the Phenom processor in its best light, and as we've found in some other memory tests, this might simply be a design issue that will be corrected in a future revision.