3dMark05 - Within Windows XP Pro 64 Bit Edition

3dMark03 - Within Windows XP Pro 32 Bit

No earth shattering records here. This proves that while some improvements are to be found through ever improving CPU's, video games are much more limited to the graphics adapter than the CPU. The 3dMark suite does not have support for multi-threaded, multi-cpu environments. Gamers will likely see improvements when games support multiple CPU's, currently only some of the high end flight sim's have such support.

ScienceMark 2.0

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Sciencemark provides bandwidth and general scores shown against a dual processor AMD Opeteron running at 2.0ghz.

Additional Applications

The AMD X2 will not see significant advantages in most of these benchmarks due to the lack of multi-threading and more importantly multi-cpu support. In fact according to AMD the key applications that will gain a dual core scaling advantage are:

* 3DS Max 6 ~80% performance gain
* LightWave 8 ~70% to 85% performance gain
* Canopus ProCoder, Procoder Express ~68% faster MPG to DVD
* Windows Media Encoder ~76% faster DV to WMV
* Mandelbrot generator C/C++ runs ~99% faster
* Adobe Premiere Pro ~17% - 60% faster depending on the project
* Cyberlink Power Director ~85% MPEG2, ~90% WMV, ~99% DivX
* Windows MovieMaker ~42%
* Photo Shop depends on the filters used (not all filters are multithreaded)

With this in mind you have to take stock of the programs you are most likely to use this process for before making a buying decision.

Final thoughts and conclusion.