CPU Reviews & Articles

Business Winstone 2001

While pure CPU speed is a large part of overall performance, it is also important to look at the value of a CPU from a system point of view. The Business Winstone 2001 suite from ZD Labs is an application-based PC benchmark that uses common business programs like MS Office 2000, FrontPage 2000, Lotus Notes, and Netscape. New in the 2001 version are tests for file compression, anti-virus scanning and email. These programs are run from a batch script that attempts to accurately emulate a business system load, then supplies a performance rating.

In Business Winstone 2001 testing, the Athlon XP 1900+ continued AMD's dominance with this benchmark and simply left the Pentium 4-2.0 GHz in the dust. This is hardly surprising given that even the Athlon 1.4 GHz is faster than the Pentium 4-2.0 GHz at this particular benchmark. It is nice to see that AMD continues to excel at the business application end, while offering very noticeable performance gains when using the newer Athlon XP processor.

Content Creation Winstone 2001

Content Creation Winstone 2001 is another benchmark from ZD Labs, but while Business Winstone rates a system's business performance, Content Creation Winstone uses multimedia applications such as Adobe Photoshop & Premiere, Macromedia Director & Dreamweaver, and Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge. These applications are also run somewhat-concurrently, as applications stay active and resident while not in active use. This makes Content Creation Winstone 2001 one of the best application stress tests available, and a very fine judge of overall system performance.

Once again the Athlon XP 1900+ comes out as the performance winner, and builds up a pretty hefty lead with an impressive Content Creation Winstone score. This is one of the most surprising benchmark results, since the Pentium 4 is usually quite good at multimedia and Internet application performance.

BAPCO SysMark 2001

In the area of BAPCO's SysMark 2001 testing there is currently some issues regarding its effectiveness as a testing tool for the AMD Athlon XP. Apparently the Windows Media Encoder portion of the application suite does not recognize the Athlon XP as SSE-enabled and therefore reports a lower score for that segment. AMD has issued a Windows XP script that updates the system registry and a DLL used by the Media Encoder program, thereby allowing the Athlon XP to work to its fullest potential. In order to maintain consistency with our standard Win 98SE and Win 200 Pro testing and since BAPCO will not change the core applications of a release program revision, the Athlon XP has been tested under the default SysMark 2001 configuration.

Due to the above caveat, let's keep this section short and simple. The Pentium 4 naturally comes out on top, though the Athlon XP (even without SSE enabled) still puts in a good showing. The most telling portion of benchmark results are how superior the hardware data prefetch of the Athlon XP seems to be over the basic Athlon core design.