Business Application Performance

We start off with Business Winstone 2004, a benchmark that has since been discontinued by VeriTest but one we continue to use because of the relevance of its results. Business Winstone doesn't generally vary all that much with CPU speed as the benchmark itself is quite I/O heavy. As you can see below, this doesn't stop the Core 2 Extreme X6800 from maintaining a healthy lead over the FX-62:

Business Winstone 2004

With a 17.5% performance advantage, the Core 2 Extreme starts off by performing very well in an area where the Pentium 4 could not: general business applications. The Pentium D would not only offer mediocre performance here, but also produce a lot of heat while doing it; Intel's Core architecture is a very different beast and the results here show it.

We turned to SYSMark 2004's Office Productivity suite for another look at office application performance, and the results were no less impressive:

SYSMark 2004 - Overall Office Productivity Performance

Overall Office Productivity performance with the Core 2 Extreme X6800 is just over 26% faster than the identically configured FX-62. The breakdown of the OP suite is below, as you can see some individual tests are closer than others:

SYSMark 2004 - Communication Performance

SYSMark 2004 - Document Creation Performance

SYSMark 2004 - Data Analysis Performance

The Communication tests in particular are very close, but there's a strong possibility that is because of the I/O bound nature of those benchmarks. The Communication suite was great at showcasing hard disk performance, so it's not a surprise that it barely shows any performance difference between the two CPUs.

Memory Latency and Bandwidth Content Creation Performance
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  • saratoga - Tuesday, June 6, 2006 - link

    Seriously. Whats with all the noobs in here who can't read a benchmark?
  • toyota - Tuesday, June 6, 2006 - link

    whats the big deal? we just want to see what some realistic benchmarks look like in addition to the cpu specific ones.
  • smitty3268 - Tuesday, June 6, 2006 - link

    What you want is a gpu benchmark. What's the big deal? This is an article about cpus. If you want a gpu benchmark, go to another article because this one isn't for you.

    It's no different than if I were to come in and start complaining about how this article didn't test the performance of external usb hard drives. Sure, this article doesn't have anything to do with that, but I actually have a usb hdd and I don't have a Conroe, so it would be useful to me. Who cares about these stupid cpu tests, I want my usb hdd test!!!
  • IntelUser2000 - Tuesday, June 6, 2006 - link

    quote:

    whats the big deal? we just want to see what some realistic benchmarks look like in addition to the cpu specific ones.


    But the result will be as expected, there will be no difference thanks for CPU limitations are high resolutions.
  • zsdersw - Tuesday, June 6, 2006 - link

    quote:

    It looks like with 65mm alone AMD may be able to challenge for the crown


    If the clock speeds of Core 2 Duo at launch are all there is to ever be, maybe.. but that's probably about as likely as the US government paying off its debts and balancing the budget.
  • Miggle - Tuesday, June 6, 2006 - link

    I can't believe that most loggers here just does not understand the concept of isolation in tests. We are testing CPU speed here and as much as possible, we want to keep the GPU from affecting the results. Sure the difference would be smaller once we apply AA/AF but thats not because the X2 starts running faster but because the GPU is beginning to limit the fps. 20% is a huge difference for CPUs in the same price range... AMD may have FX64 by the time core2 is released but its not going to chop down that 20% performance lead down to 15% even. I'm an AMD fan but I got to hand the crown to intel for Core2. I'm particularly looking at the $183 core2.... should be faster than the X2 3800+ and cooler too
  • classy - Tuesday, June 6, 2006 - link

    I don't think you understand. Years ago the cpu was the most important part of the system. That is far from the truth today. Truth is people play games with AA/AF and people do things at higher resolutions. That is just a fact of life. If you want to run pure cpu tests then run things at 640x480 then. That will show some facts, but escape the truth. Truth is the cpu is limited by the rest of the system components and who in the hell would pay $1000 for a cpu and put it in a system with to play games with no aa/af or run the desktop at 640x480. I think you fit in with that group of loggers you mentioned.
  • coldpower27 - Wednesday, June 7, 2006 - link


    Then let's GPU limit the FX 62 and Pentium EE 965 and bench them together and show there is no difference between them at high resolutions like 1920x1200. :D

    This argument works in Intel's favour as well you know.
  • IntelUser2000 - Tuesday, June 6, 2006 - link

    quote:

    I don't think you understand. Years ago the cpu was the most important part of the system. That is far from the truth today. Truth is people play games with AA/AF and people do things at higher resolutions. That is just a fact of life. If you want to run pure cpu tests then run things at 640x480 then. That will show some facts, but escape the truth. Truth is the cpu is limited by the rest of the system components and who in the hell would pay $1000 for a cpu and put it in a system with to play games with no aa/af or run the desktop at 640x480. I think you fit in with that group of loggers you mentioned.


    Except the gamers like my friend where he plays somewhat competitively and complains that he gets lag spikes playing DoD: Source with Pentium M 2.0GHz laptop(a Dell XPS M170) with Geforce 7800GTX Go, at 1024x768 resolution. He also runs at 1024x768 for BF2 because of the same reason, and he still notices lag.

    There's another guy which notices lag with A64 3000+ Radeon 9800 running Counter-Strike based on the FIRST HL engine.

    The ones who play competitively wouldn't notice. But the "normal" people will also notice no difference running the same system with Sempron or Celeron D.
  • IntelUser2000 - Tuesday, June 6, 2006 - link

    quote:

    The ones who play competitively wouldn't notice. But the "normal" people will also notice no difference running the same system with Sempron or Celeron D.


    The ones who doesn't play competitively wouldn't notice.

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