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:
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Open Trillian
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Open Excel Sheet
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Open PDF file to page 15 (complicated data)
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Open Firefox, with three tabs, each of heavy Flash content (stored locally)
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Open iTunes and play 12 song playlist
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Start NAV virus scan on HDDs
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Open Razor Lame and add files to be encoded
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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 MP3 encoding show the FX-60 already with the lead in the single application mode.
Once we turn on the background applications, the FX-60 processor shows a very noticeable performance gain on the X2 4800+ processor. Though the 30% gain over the previous best AMD processor is great, the Intel Pentium XE 955 processor and XE 840 are both more than a match for the FX-60.
