For 18 days, THG readers were able to follow the duel between AMD and Intel as another live stress test examined the latest system platforms from the two chipmakers. Pitted against each were the fastest available processors from both manufacturers.

The AMD system featured the Dresden-manufactured 90 nm Athlon 64 X2 4800+, which consists of two FX-53 cores each running at 2.4 GHz with 1 MB L2 cache. The processor understands new command extensions; in addition to SSE and SSE2, it now supports SSE3 as well. This should make its effects felt in applications using video encoding.

Its opponent was the Intel Pentium 840 EE, which sports two type 540 Pentium 4 cores. They are both clocked at 3.2 GHz and fitted with a 1 MB L2 cache. Based purely on clock speed, the double-core processor from Intel suggests more performance. But even Intel no longer speaks of clock speed, preferring to use code numbers.