AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Dual Core Processor Review

Multitasking: Scenario 2

Scenario 2

I would consider this to be a light multitasking environment with only the bare minimum applications running in the background.  In this test NAV was not doing a virus scan, but was enabled doing its standard monitoring.  iTunes was playing MP3s and we timed the Razor Lame app encoding the same MP3s.

1. Norton AV starts on bootup, in monitoring mode only
2. Open Trillian
3. Open iTunes and play 12 song playlist
4. Open Razor Lame and add files to be encoded
5. Encode MP3s and time

The window order, from bottom most viewable to top most was: iTunes -> Razor Lame. 

The same base results are used from the previous scenarios here on scenario 2, as our test application remains the MP3 encoder.

With only minor multitasking going on, the performance gains of the dual core processors are much less noticeable.  Here we see the X2 4400+ beating the 3700+ by only 7 seconds on the MP3 encoding and still falling behind the FX-55 processor. 

These results should tell you that for extremely light multitasking, the processor that performs the best in your primary application (in this case MP3 encoding) will probably still perform better than the competing CPU (be it a dual-core CPU or otherwise). 

Let’s move on to our last scenario.