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PC Mark 2004PCMark 04 is the latest version of the popular PCMark series. PCMark04 is an application-based benchmark and a premium tool for measuring overall PC performance. It uses portions of real applications instead of including very large applications or using specifically created code. This allows PCMark04 to be a smaller installation as well as to report very accurate results. As far as possible, PCMark04 uses public domain applications whose source code can be freely examined by any user. 
 

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Hey now, that is interesting. PCMark 2004 has a soft-spot for Intel processors. The scores in favor of Intel CPU's can relate to two things, Hyper-threading technology and the other, clock for clock performance. Bare in mind that this Athlon 64 FX-57+ CPU runs at 2800 MHz while our fastest Intel silicon handles 4000 MHz. I did not expect this outcome though, so I checked other articles. And they are on par with our findings.

Again, these are synthetic benchmarks. They really do not tell us that much do they? BTW we are testing with the new PCMark 2005 already yet need to gather more data before I can show you some comparative results.

MP3 Encoding

Something I did not exactly expect was the Athlon 64 4000+ system to be faster during encoding sessions. We took a little program called dBpowerAMP and convert a 58 MB .wav file towards a 192kbs MP3 (Lame) file at 44100 in Stereo. For the freaks, this was the London Symphony Orchestra - Prokofiev - Romeo & Juliet, Introduction, Montagues and Capulets.

Quite frankly I expected the Pentium 4 3.6 GHz clocked at 4 GHz to win here as P4's have a solid reputation in encoding stuff. The score shows the amount of seconds needed to compress the file and of course the lower the better.

Everest Home Edition

It offers accurate hardware information and diagnostics capabilities, including online features, memory benchmarks, hardware monitoring, and low-level hardware information. EVEREST Home Edition is optimized for Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 operating systems, and it fully supports the XP look & feel.

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Everest is a tool that is growing slowly on me, at the last minute I decided to include the results. Synthetic numbers simply are the best way to show you the exact difference between timings and frequencies. Something that is very hard to show with games.

Charming and rather accurate reports are offered by this little benchmark suite especially for memory in this tool. Here we can see bandwidth grow once we alter all the goodness.