Written By:
Date Posted: February 5, 2002

MP3 Audio

CBR MP3

Now we will look at what has made the music industry stand up and take notice, that of MP3's.  I'm sure almost everyone has ripped CD's or even made their own mp3's, but what kind of encoder do we use, currently is one of the foremost engines that is able to encode MP3's with a proper front-end and its free.  The benchmarks here consider WinLame which uses Lame 3.88. First we'll look at CBR encoded MP3's and secondly we'll look at VBR

So on to CBR and VBR Wave to mp3 conversions:

What can we see with MP3 encoding?  We can see that with CBR mp3's all three processors go up in a 'cache arrangement' with the T-Bird leading the pack.  The processors go up at 1% per 1% clock speed increase since the data can easily fit into the cache of the processors.  With VBR we can see that the T-Bird and Duron show their power with a 750MHz Duron almost catching the 850 Celeron, and the T-Bird can beat the 900MHz Duron.

Linux Kernel 2.4.9

Now those who use Linux know that compiling their kernel is one of the single easiest ways to add new features into your system and also streamline your system, getting rid of unnecessary features.  Compiling the kernel is a time consuming process that involves CPU, Hard drive, and RAM which makes it a very good system or even CPU test.  While 2.4.9 might not be the newest kernel it still helps show performance differences. 

I compiled using the following commands (after downloading 2.4.9):

1. tar zxf Linux-2.4.9.tar.gz <enter>
2. cd linux <enter>
3. make config <enter>
4. press enter until the command prompt is back
5. make zImage <enter>

So what does this show?  The T-Bird blows by the other processors as a 650 T-Bird beats both a 850 Celeron and 900MHz Duron.  The Duron is about the same speed as the Celeron.  All processors over a 550MHz T-Bird or 750MHz Duron/Celeron, can compile the kernel in less than 10 minutes.

Adobe Premiere 6.01

Let us look at Premiere 6.01 and a test that allows us to see how a CPU performs compared to what a Matrox RT-2500 card can do in real-time.   This test adds transitions to a title and then is rendered.  So let us look at this last test to see if it follows the same routine as the other benchmarks.

It seems that the Celeron doesn't fair well in this test as  a 550MHz Duron or T-Bird is as fast as a Celeron 850.  The Duron and T-Bird both perform about the same in this test.but they do not increase in step with their clock speed.

Conclusion

So what can we conclude about the Duron processor?   In comparison with the Celeron we can see that in most benchmarks both processors seem to perform equally.  The Duron beats the Celeron  in a six of the fourteen programs such as MPEG-1 encoding, Terragen, VBR mp3 encoding, Premiere 6.01 , Truespace Wireframe and Render to file.  The Celeron only beats the Duron where its SSE instructions allow it to take the lead.  When it does take a lead the Duron literally blows the Celeron out of the water as it has a 200MHz speed gap between the two in those cases.  Comparing price, the Duron is the same if not slightly cheaper than the Celeron at all speed grades.

What about in comparison with the T-Bird?  In this case about six times out of the fourteen the Duron ties or comes close to the T-Bird on a clock for clock basis.  It never does better than the T-Bird because they are both the same except that as stated at the beginning of this article.

So is the Duron a good processor?  Yes it is for the price you could get a 1.2GHz Duron with SSE instructions or a 1GHz T-Bird, both of which use the same motherboard.  That is one of the major points in favor of this processor compared to the Celeron.  The beauty is that if you are on a budget you could pick up the motherboard you want and then just put the Duron on instead of a more expensive Athlon XP.  This is what I have done upgrading from my old Duron 650 to my current T-Bird 1GHz.

How far can they overclock? Just taking a look around it seems that for most Duron's it averages about a 200MHz overclock with some being better than others.  I personally managed to get about 260MHz more out of my processor.

What rating to give this processor... hmm well we know that its a fast processor for a budget price, the overclocking is fairly good and it performs about the same or faster than an equally clocked Celeron.  I would personally say that this is definitely a top pick for those on a tight budget but as compared to a T-Bird it may not be worth the $10-$20 price difference.

dsp

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