AMD Athlon 64 3800+ - Page 5

PCMark04

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.

PCMark04 includes 4 categorized suites for benchmarking your computer. These include a CPU, Graphics, Memory and a Hard Disk Drive benchmark.

As you can see, we've excluded the HDD results from the chart, since they are completely worthless for our purposes. Also, we had some problems running the CPU suite under 64-bits.

Let's examine the extended results:

You may have noticed that it's the DivX encoding CPU benchmark we haven't been able to run under 64-bits. Instead, we run our own little benchmark, re-encoding our Finding Nemo DVD movie into MPEG2 format using DVD-Shrink.

Our results: On 32-bit windows: 15 minutes 36 seconds. On 64-bit windows: 15 minutes 34 seconds.

The difference is once again negligible as was the case with most of the PCMark04 tests.

Windows XP x64 seems to work almost as well as the 32-bit version. Its file handling has improved a bit but all the other results point to the same old 32-bit version.

Still, note the results on the transparent windows test under the Graphics suite. In this test, 10 windows are drawn on-screen and then faded in and out. The results are then recorded in average number of windows drawn per second.

Here x64 performance drops dramatically. With an average of 365 windows per second, it fails miserably to even yield half the 32-bit 2D-accelleration performance.

Apparently ATI's beta driver is the one responsible here and hopefully everything will be fixed as soon as Windows x64 Edition draws closer to the final stage of release.