General System Performance

The PC WorldBench 6.0 test suite developed and provided by PCWorld is designed for determining overall system performance for the home office user. This tool provides results for ten different real world applications that range from Adobe Photoshop to AutoDesk 3ds Max. This benchmark is useful for providing comparative results across a broad array of Graphics, CPU, Hard Disk, and Memory configurations. We chose a subset of this package that represents applications more commonly used in the home environment.

Adobe Photoshop CS2

General System Performance - PC WorldBench 6.0

Since the introduction of the Intel Core 2 Duo architecture, Intel has enjoyed a significant lead in this particular benchmark. The E2160 is 13% faster at stock than the 3800+ and 33% faster when overclocked. Our overclocked AM2 budget processors perform roughly equal to our reference X2 6000+. The BE-2300 has a performance increase of 51% when overclocked while the X2 3800+ improves by 40% and the E2160 ends up 64% faster - almost perfectly linear performance scaling with clock speed.

Windows Media Encoder 9.0

General System Performance - PC WorldBench 6.0

Once again, our overclocked AM2 budget processors perform the same as our reference X2 6000+ while the E2160 leads the grouping, although the margin of victory is much smaller in this test. Like Photoshop, WME tends to favor the Core 2 architecture. The BE-2300 has a performance increase of 32% while the X2 3800+ improves by 28% when overclocked. The E2160 shows a 48% improvement when overclocked, scoring 10% faster than the next closest competitor versus only 3.6% faster at stock speeds.

WinZip 10.0

General System Performance - PC WorldBench 6.0

In our final benchmark that is generally CPU throughput and memory latency sensitive, we see the BE-2300 has a performance increase of 60% while the X2 3800+ improves by 38% when overclocked. The E2160 improves by 50% with overclocking. Based on CPU speed alone, our two budget AM2 processors are once again equal with our X2 6000+. There's nothing surprising there, though the fact that the increased HTT speeds of our budget processors overcame the L2 cache advantage of the 6000+ in our application tests is at least somewhat interesting. The E2160 again takes top honors among the overclocked budget CPUs, scoring 8.4% faster than the others; at stock speed it's roughly the same performance as the 3800+.

In a quick recap of the PC WorldBench results, the three AM2 boards all more or less tie when equipped with the same CPU. There are minor variations, but nothing statistically significant.

Futuremark Benchmarks Gaming Performance
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  • DrMrLordX - Thursday, August 2, 2007 - link

    AM2+ K10 chips will "plop right in"to AM2 boards with the proper BIOS support, so I would assume they would work in this board too, regardless of whether it supports HT3, separates power planes, etc. Of course, that's all up to the board manufacturer and their BIOS support for K10.

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