AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 1.33GHz/1.30GHz

It's time for new Tests

In order to make this CPU review more interesting, we've added a few new tests into the mix that will allow us to get a broader picture of the performance of all of the CPUs.  In addition to our usual Winstone, SYSMark and Viewperf numbers we are introducing a few new tests. 

This is the second time we are using CSA Research's Benchmark Studio, this time using Beta 2.0 of the suite.  From our ServerWorks III HEsl Review, where we first debuted the Benchmark Studio suite, here is a quick description of what makes it stand out:

"The package is called Benchmark Studio and its key component is called Office Bench. The beauty of the way Office Bench works is that it not only performs the normal tasks any Business Winstone-like benchmark would (working with MS Word, Excel and Power Point) but it also can work with Benchmark Studio to simulate other types of load. The types of load that the Benchmark Studio can simulate range from accessing databases to checking email and streaming video. Using the Benchmark Studio interface you can completely customize how many instances of each type of load you'd like to create and when they loop."

Beta 2.0 of Benchmark Studio is simply a more stable build of the suite; the metrics and load simulators remain the same.  We only used one suite configuration; with a total of 13 load simulations running which the Office Bench script ran.  The score that was outputted was in seconds, the lower the better.

The Benchmark Studio scores should be an indication of how users in the IT world as well as power users at home would benefit from the individual processors and platforms. 

MP3 Encoding

In spite of the recent injunction against Napster, MP3s are still as popular as ever and they will only continue to grow in popularity.  Going along with this, we have included two timed audio encoding tests in the comparison.  Using the MusicMatch Jukebox 6.0, an audio encoder that uses the Fraunhoffer codec.  We used a 100MB WAV file and timed its conversion to a Variable Bit Rate (VBR) MP3, with the quality/compression setting at 75%.  We also used the same 100MB WAV file and timed its conversion to a 128-kbps Windows Media Audio (WMA) file. 

MP3 encoding is a good test of FPU and cache performance, since the process is not as system memory bandwidth focused as video encoding.