System Benchmarks II
LAME is the antithesis of the system benchmarks seen up until this point. Entirely bound by the speed of the SIMD unit on the CPU, clock speed is king for this benchmark and L2 cache size and memory controller performance make very little difference. The P4 is able to hold off the CPU costing nearly three times as much, if only by a solitary second. It shows that software can be as much of a performance deciding factor as the base hardware.
Sciencemark shows us exactly what we've been seeing before, LAME aside. It's CPU clock, L2 and to a certain extent memory controller, sensitive. The Platina has absolutely no problems outpacing the P4 reference system here, to the tune of ~10%, just like we saw with Pifast.
So, taking into account our first brace of system tests, can we conclude anything at this halfway stage? Absolutely. Despite my whinging about the comparatively poor memory modules, they still allow the Platina to comfortably outpace the reference system in all but LAME MP3 encoding, something the P4 is traditionally strong at. The FX-51 CPU takes almost all the credit, since the nForce3 motherboard provided by ASUS isn't as strong as other Athlon 64 motherboard on the market today. While the CPU itself may cost the wronge side of £600, it certainly has complete class leading x86 performance, with only the £700+ 3.2 Extreme Edition Pentium 4 any kind of equal. It will stay that way until early 2004 too, by all accounts.
Graphical benchmarks now.