AMD FX-55/4000+ CPU Review :: SYSmark and PCMark 2004

SYSmark is designed as a group of applications that test your system in a manner that is supposed to simulate real-world environments. Usually more favorable to Intel, a few years back AMD joined the team at www.bapco.com in an effort to make the SYSmark test a more balanced and level playing field for all platforms. Those efforts have proved fruitful and now AMD is the one who shows higher overall scores in a sudden flip of reality. This test takes hours to install and then hours to run and is not for the meek hearted and is intended as the holy grail of PC testing suites. It cannot be downloaded and must be bought as a professional testing tool.

PCmark 2004 is a synthetic based series of tests that focuses mainly on two aspects of your system, the CPU and the memory. The CPU tests are geared to isolate the performance of the CPU and in total there are nine tests to be run in this test phase. Two pairs of tests are run multithreaded, with each test in the pair running in its own thread and the remaining five are run single threaded. These tests include such functions as file encryption, decryption, compression and decompression, grammar check, audio conversion, WMV and DivX video compression.

The Memory test suite is a collection of tests that isolate the performance of the memory subsystem. The memory subsystem consists of various devices on the PC. This includes the main memory, the CPU internal cache (known as the L1 cache) and the external cache (known as the L2 cache). As it is difficult to find applications that only stress the memory, we explicitly developed a set of tests geared for this purpose. The tests are written in C++ and assembly. They include: Reading data blocks from memory, writing data blocks to memory performing copy operations on data blocks, random access to data items and latency testing.

We show the overall score of both tests combined as it is the compilation of the both tests in a raw number. The Intel CPUs with their higher clock speeds showed the best results in the CPU tests, and the AMD with its better built-in memory controller beat the Intel chips in the memory tests. In the end when you tabulate the whole score though, the results showed they finished up scoring very closely to each other. PCmark can be easily downloaded and ran if you would like to compare results using your own system as the test bed, and it does not takes hours to run like its cousin SYSmark 2004.