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We started by running SYSmark 2004 on the X2 4800+, and we immediately hit a problem. We were using Windows XP Pro SP2 and the Office part of SYSmark wouldn’t run as the No Execute protection kept kicking in. This occurred a number of times until we disabled both of the integrated LANs and installed an Intel Pro/100 NIC and then switched from nVidia’s firewall to the Windows firewall. This is particularly odd as you run SYSmark 2004 with networking disabled so you wouldn’t have thought that it would much matter what the settings were but there we have it.

Once we’d cured the problem the X2 4800+ pumped out a startling score of 281 in SYSmark 2004, while the results in 3DMark05 and Doom3 were much as you would expect.

We removed the X2 4800+ and replaced it with an Athlon 64 FX-53 which runs at the same 2.4GHz and also has 1MB of L2 cache, so we were able to carry out a direct back-to-back comparison between single core and dual core processors and the results were telling. There was no change at all in 3DMark05 and Doom3 but the SYSmark 2004 score dropped from 281 to 214 marks. Most of the change was in the Internet Content Creation part of the test where the software runs scripts in Discreet 3D Studio Max, Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Dreamweaver and the like.

To put that score of 281 for the X2 4800+ into context, the Armari that we used for our dual core Opteron feature had a pair of Opteron 875s running at 2.2GHz and it scored 254 marks.

The X2 4800+ has a 200MHz core speed advantage, uses faster memory than Opteron and has a very fast hard disk array but even so it was a real surprise to see how well it performed in SYSmark.

The reason that X2 4800+ shows a 50 per cent improvement in the ICC part of SYSmark over the FX-53 is due to the multi-threaded nature of the applications, and the reason that it shows no benefit in gaming is that most games don’t yet use multiple threads.

You might feel that the X2 4800+ looks very pretty on paper, but if you have no yearn for the digital lifestyle it may look like an expensive luxury. We wondered about that so we ran the same real world usability test that we performed on the Pentium Extreme Edition and Armari dual 875. We loaded up Bit Defender anti virus and iTunes, and set the two applications running. While Bit Defender ran a full system virus scan we started to encode three albums of MP3 files to AAC format with iTunes, and then we started to play Doom3.

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