Multitasking: Scenario 1
Scenario 1
I consider this to be the heavy multitasking scenario that uses nearly all of the applications listed above in some fashion. I had Norton AV doing a virus scan on the hard drives, Trillian open and running in the background, Firefox open with three tabs on Flash-heavy sites, iTunes playing a playlist of MP3s, Acrobat open to a large, complicated PDF file with lots of layers, Excel open with a 3 MB data sheet and then timed Razor Lame encoding a dozen WAV files into MP3 format at 320 kbps. Here is a complete step by step of my application start up process:
-
Open Trillian
-
Open Excel Sheet
-
Open PDF file to page 15 (complicated data)
-
Open Firefox, with three tabs, each of heavy Flash content (stored locally)
-
Open iTunes and play 12 song playlist
-
Start NAV virus scan on HDDs
-
Open Razor Lame and add files to be encoded
-
Encode MP3s and time
The window order, from bottom most viewable to top most was: Acrobat -> iTunes -> Norton AV -> Razor Lame. Keeping Acrobat at least partly visible forced the system to continue processing the data in the file.
The base results from our first show that the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ OC holds an edge on the LAME MP3 encoding test, as we already saw in our previous benchmark results.
Here we should first note that the 4000+ just takes a beating here as a single core processor would in these types of tests; almost 352% slower! THe 3800+ stock shows a 91% slow down and the 4800+ shows a 71% performance drop. The 3800+ OC shows a similar 75% slowdown, though it is still the fastest result on our first multitasking test.
