Test Software is as follows:
SiSoft Sandra 2005 - Our standard synthetic benchmark suite, updated to version 2005. While it doesn't provide real-world information, it does give us a base for the rest of the tests.
Business & Content Creation Winstone 2004 - A scripted benchmark using real-world applications. Higher numbers are better.
SYSMark 2004 Office and Content Creation - Another scripted benchmark using real-world applications. Like the previous tests, higher numbers are better.
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.
TMPGEnc 2.521 - We used an Animatrix file, titled , and a WAV created from VirtualDub. The movie was then converted it into a DVD compliant MPEG-2 file with a bitrate of 5000. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.
CDex Audio Conversion Wav to MP3 - CDex was used to convert a 414MB Wav file to a 320kbs MP3. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.
Doom 3, Far Cry, Unreal Tournament 2003 & 2004 @ 640x480, LQ Settings - While higher resolutions tax the video card, lower resolutions rely on CPU and subsystem speed. These results are real-world, and higher scores are better. was used to collect numbers from Far Cry and UT2004.
All benchmarks will be run a total of three times with the average scores being displayed. Any system tweaks and ram timings were configured to the best possible for each platform.
SiSoft Sandra 2005 CPU
SiSoft Sandra 2005 MMX
With the exception of one part of the SiSoft CPU test, the 3.73GHz finishes on top of the pack here. The differences between the two Intel chips is not as large as one may expect, but this benchmark is synthetic and merely provides a scale for comparison.
Winstone 2004
Is Intel the better performer in applications? Based on the results above, I'd say not really as the 3.73EE places second here. Considering that the K8T890 board we used for the FX-55 does not support NCQ (the drive used for all three platforms support it), the results were a bit surprising, but nonetheless, the FX-55 squeaks a small victory here.
SYSMark 2004
Things are looking better for the 3.73EE here as it finishes on top of the pack in Content Creation. Given than many of Sysmark's tests are Hyper-Threading aware, this may have been a factor, but the extra cache, and faster FSB probably didn't hurt. As for the Office Productivity tests, the FX-55 and 3.73EE are more or less even.
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