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PC Mark 2004PCMark 04 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. 
 

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Hey now, that is interesting. I never knew that PCMark 2004 had a soft-spot for Intel. 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 3600 MHz. I did not expect this outcome though, so I checked other articles. And they are on par with our findings.

Again, these are synthetic benchmarks. They really do not tell us that much do they?

MP3 Encoding

Something I did not exactly expect was the Athlon 64 4000+ system to be faster during encoding sessions. 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.

Quite frankly I expected even the Pentium 4 3.4 GHz to win here as P4's have a reputation in crunching stuff, unfortunately the Extreme Edition Pentium 4 already went back to Intel, likely that one could have beaten this CPU though. The score is in seconds need to compress the file, and of course the lower the better.