Kryotech Super G2 Athlon 1.86GHz

IT/Enterprise Computing Performance

CSA Research’s Office Bench 2001 is another interesting benchmark tool as it allows us to see how hardware scales as application load increases.  As the name implies the benchmark runs a series of office tasks in its baseline configuration; the beauty of the tool is that you can increase the load on the system by simulating other types of stress such as interacting with an exchange server, an Access database or simply playing back a Windows Media file.

We benchmarked in three separate configurations; the first is baseline office performance with no additional loading tasks working in the background. The second configuration is with the database, email and media player stress simulators all set to the lowest loading level and the third test setup is with all of the stress simulators set to the second highest loading level. The office benchmark scripts being executed while all of these loading simulators are being run never change, and performance is measured as a function of time in seconds.

For basic office tasks the Super G2 takes the lead, however the advantage is negligible since the nature of the tasks is such that they don’t really require a powerful system.  When was the last time you felt the need for a 1.866GHz Athlon in order to run Word or Excel?

Starting the load simulators helps spread the contenders out a bit.  The single processor Athlon MP and Pentium 4 1.8GHz CPUs are clearly at the bottom of the charts, while the uppermost clump consists of the Super G2, dual Athlon MP and overclocked Pentium 4 2GHz.  Again the Super G2 takes the lead but it isn’t an incredible advantage. 

Let’s see what happens when things get just a bit more stressful…

Although this may seem surprising at first, it actually makes a lot of sense.  The more concurrent processes that are running, the greater value having two processors (and thus the ability to execute two threads simultaneously) offers the end user. In this case, all of the single processor systems group together and offer somewhat similar performance (of course with the Super G2 offering the highest) and at the top of them all, the dual Athlon MP with a significant advantage.