AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Preview

Multi-Tasking Performance Notes:

We noticed a number of things during our multi-tasking benchmarks, in that some of the tests did not work quite as well as others, graphically. However, during our benchmarks, we came across a number of things that are not picked up by the graphs above.

In our first Multi-Tasking test, we noticed that the virus scanning was less efficient when running FarCry in the foreground on both the Athlon 64 FX-55 and the Athlon 64 4000+. It continued to run in the background, but we noticed the odd hitch in game play despite running a time demo, which should be less CPU limited as there are no AI movements and such to be calculated.

In our second Multi-Tasking test, the single cored processors ground to a halt and we found it very hard to control DVD Shrink - we ended up having to end the process, rather than close the program in the normal fashion. We also experienced hitching inside FarCry, more so than when the virus scanner was running in the background. In short, don't try and play games while encoding a DVD on a single cored Athlon 64 processor, you will not have a pleasurable gaming experience, no matter how fast your video card and CPU are.

Our third multi-tasking test, we experienced extreme lag during video playback, and generally the CPU did not want to handle more than one process at a time. We increased the process priority of both DVD Shrink and Windows Media Player 10 in order to complete the test, and even then, we still experienced very poor playback of our video recording. The Athlon 64 X2 4800+ did not suffer such problems, and we saw no noticeable lag during video playback, while the encoding time remained very good too.

The final multi-tasking test was the only test where we did not experience any kind of lag or hitching on the Athlon 64 FX-55 and 4000+ processors. However, the MP3 encoding time increased considerably with the Athlon 64 X2 4800+ nearly 1 1/2 times as fast as it's similarly clocked, single cored cousin.