Milo, wow. That was as complete a benchmark suite as I've ever seen. Well, maybe. ;)
A few interesting points, though.
- For one, it looks like the Pentium 4 still keeps up admirably. It gets surpassed in many tests, but not by as far as I would have thought.
- Second, look just how much Pentium 4 optimizations can make in a rendering application like Lightwave 7. The 2.0GHz Pentium 4 beats the 1.4GHz Athlon in 5/6 tests and the Athlon XP 1800+ in 3/6 tests. Not bad, since the Pentium 4 normally does abysmally in rendering. For proof, look at the 3D Studio MAX scores.
- Next, look at how well the Athlon XP 1800+ does in video tests, probably because of the SSE support. The MusicMatch test took me the most by surprise, with a 2.6x improvement over the Athlon 1.4GHz. There obviously needs to be more SSE and SSE-2 enabled apps out there.
- It also looks like the Athlon XP 1800+ does very well in games, probably also due to the SSE support. However, it still looks like the Pentium 4 can hold its own. Again, for more than I expected.
But thanks again for the link. Pity there was not an Athlon XP 1500+ comparison. I would have liked to start our bet. ;-)
wanna_bmw |
