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MP3 Encoding

Something I did not exactly expect was the Athlon 64 4000+ system to be as fast during encoding sessions as the Pentium 4 4.0 GHz. 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.

The score is in seconds need to compress the file, and of course the lower the better. Both the nForce AMD and Intel edition performed the same.

PC Mark 2004

PCMark04 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. 
 

Info and download - Download!

The results compare your average 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 system (Intel 865 chipset) with today's new mainboard and CPU. The Intel nForce 4 Intel SLI Edition mainboard clearly is favored over AMD systems with this benchmark. 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 4000+ CPU runs at 2400 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. Really nice scores in favor of the Intel Edition platform though.

Let's have a look at some gaming benchmarks.