SiSoft Sandra 2004

Although a synthetic benchmark, it's a popular one, freely available if you wish to make comparison benchmarks. We will be testing the CPU, and MMX performance, using the 32-bit 2004 version.

CPU Arithmetic Benchmark

Of interesting note is that while the Athlon XP was equal the Pentium 4 in clock speed, in no way did it transfer to synthetic benchmark scores, as the Athlon XP barely pulled ahead of the Pentium 4 in our first round of SiSoft Sandra testing when both CPU's were at equal clock speed. The Pentium 4 showed its muscle in the second round when it had an 800 MHZ advantage on the Athlon XP.

CPU Multimedia Benchmark

The pattern does continue, proving that clock speed isn't everything, as the 2400 MHZ Athlon kept ahead of the 2.4 C by a small margin. The 3.2 C proved to be the better of the bunch, by best the Athlon XP scores in both Sandra benchmarks. Sandra is a synthetic benchmark, so it makes little sense to base your buying decision on Sandra scores.

PC Mark 2002 CPU

PCMark 2002 shows a somewhat large difference in favor of the Athlon XP at equal clock speeds. At 3.2 C speeds the Pentium 4 overtakes the Athlon XP, but by a somewhat small margin.

PiFast

A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is version 4.2, by Xavier Gourdon. We used a computation of 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory. Note that lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.

The Pentium 4, when clocked to 2.4 GHZ was beaten convincingly by the Athlon XP. At 3.2 GHZ the Pentium 4 beat out the Athlon XP by about 2.7 seconds.

TMPGEnc 2.521

I noticed that I could never get the benchmark to encode faster than 21 seconds, indicating that perhaps the benchmark is topping out at 21 seconds. Regardless, a good showing here by the Pentium 4, as it did edge out the XP @ 2.4 GHZ by one second, although it may not be indicative of how much faster the 3.2 is, since 21 seconds seems to be a top off point for this benchmark, at least with the file we use at VL.