We used a total of 19 different benchmark tests in order to obtain a well-rounded and balanced picture of the extremely overclocked AMD Athlon XP and Intel Pentium 4 processors. A quick glance at the benchmark results gives you an overview of 22 of the latest processors from AMD and Intel. Low-cost CPUs, such as the AMD Duron and Intel Celeron, were intentionally left out of the benchmark evaluation; such processors are meant for a different market segment in which high performance is not crucial. Here, the Intel Pentium 4 (overclocked to 3000 MHz) and the AMD Athlon XP 2300+ (overclocked to 1866 MHz) take center stage.

The OpenGL performances are measured through various Quake 3 tests - the Direct3D performance from the DirectX package is measured with 3D Mark 2000 (based on DirectX7) and 3D Mark 2001 (based on DirectX 8). A comprehensive test scenario is created by a variety of benchmarks for MPEG encoding: with the help of the Lame MP3 Encoder, a 178 MB WAV file is converted to the MPEG-1 Layer 3 format. One of the established standards is our MPEG-4 test, in which data from a commercial DVD-ROM is converted into MPEG-4 via Xmpeg and the Divx codec. In addition, an MPEG-2 file is created with the video editing software Pinnacle Studio 7. For a while, we have been using the professional Lightwave package version 7b from Newtek to evaluate rendering performance. Archiving is also important for practical applications; we use WinACE-Packer for that. Compiling the newest Linux Kernel 2.4.13 has long been part of our standard repertoire. In order to test office performance, we use the Sysmark 2001 benchmark.

A new addition is the synthetic benchmark suite SiSoft Sandra 2002. In comparison to its previous version, 2001, the resulting test values in this version can be reproduced. Nevertheless, a run-through of Sandra does not prove that a system is fully stable. As we've confirmed in our tests, the AMD Athlon XP could attain a benchmark value of 1912 MHz with Sandra 2002, while all other test programs caused a system crash.