PC Magazine Benchmarks

Content Creation Winstone 2004 and Business Winstone 2004

Notes

When we first explored the Prescott core last month, we were disappointed to find performance, for the most part, comparable to or slightly behind the older Northwood. In Business Winstone 2004, it didn’t matter much as all of Intel’s offerings were easily bested by AMD’s Athlon 64 FX-51. This time around, the FX-53 furthers that advantage; even the “mainstream” Athlon 64 3400+ is able to outperform the 3.4GHz Extreme Edition.

Another test that comes with the Business Winstone package is a specialized Multitasking Test, which runs the same applications as Business Winstone 2004, only it runs some of them in the background. We had originally expected Intel’s Pentium 4 to dominate here, compliments of its Hyper-Threading technology, but the Athlon 64 FX-53 pulled a surprising victory over even the fastest Extreme Edition.

Content creation is one of the Pentium 4’s purported fortes, and it does quite a bit better in PC Magazine’s Content Creation 2004 metric. Nevertheless, both Athlon 64 FX processors are able to fly right past Intel’s flagship, the FX-53 by more than nine percent.