Intel E6420 vs. AMD 5600+

Author:  Michael Lynch Date:  2007.07.23 Topic:  Processors Provider:  AMD Manufacturer:  AMD

Benchmarks:

In this section of the review we will compare the E6420 and the Athlon 5600+ to each other.

Note: The data at the top is wrong for the AMD; this is from using an older version of CPU-Z

Crystal Mark:

            Crystal Mark stresses key parts of your process and measures its performance.  For the purposes of this review you only need to pay attention to the three key sections that relate to the CPU, these sections are the Alu, Fpu, and Mem. 

57665                                                              53170

            Just looking at the top three values on each ( the Alu, Fpu, and Mem ), you can see that the scores between the two is very minute. Yet there is a difference of 4500 which places AMD at 8% higher than the Intel processor. It is interesting to note that the INtel system shows higher performance in the Hard Drive, GDI, D2D, and OGL areas as well as a slightly higher FPU score. The AMD system wins out with much higher scores in the ALU and MEM due to the higher system clock speed and integrated memory controller.

PC Mark 05

            PC Mark is a very popular benchmarking tool that is widely used.  It will measure the performance of your PC and score each component in which you are able to submit online and compare your pc with others. PC Mark as per its name delivers a score which is intended to give you relative performance of an entire system. As you can see PC Mark 05 agrees with the Crystal Mark benchmark and delivers and overall higher score to the AMD system.

Intel:

AMD:

            As you can see in the results of the PC Mark benchmark, the AMD Athlon 64 x2 5600+ received a higher rating than Intel’s Processor.  The AMD’s 5600+ was able to compress and decompress files up to 15% faster than Intel’s E6420. Both processors were able to encrypt a file at the same rate, but Intel’s E6420 was able to decrypt a file about 15% faster.  As for the image and audio compression and decompression, AMD’s 5600+ was able to perform 10% faster.  Seeing the detailed report of the CPU test, we can come to the conclusion that the AMD 5600+ surpasses the Intel E6420 in all categories except for File Decryptions.

Super Pi

            Super Pi is a very basic program that calculates pi at different size intervals, then records the data of pi to a file and also tells you the time that it took to achieve the value.  You are able to select sizes from 16kb to 32mb and will range in times according to the amount of data you want it to accumulate.

Lower times are better.

As we can see in the results of the test, the Intel E6420 was able to perform better at each and every different size interval althoughit is not until after the 256k interval that we begin to see any real world noticable differences. At 32M though the difference is sizable at more than 3 and a half minutes.