System Setup

Dual AMD Opteron 246
AMD Athlon 64 3200+
Intel Pentium 4 2.8C/800 (Hyper-Threading Enabled)
Intel Pentium 4 3.0C/800 (Hyper-Threading Enabled)

Tyan Thunder K8W (Opteron)
ASUS K8V Deluxe (Athlon 64)
Intel Desktop Board D875PBZ "Bonanza" (Pentium 4)

1 GB Corsair 2xCMX512RE-3200LL XMS DDR400 Registered ECC Ram (Opteron)
1 GB Corsair 2xCMX512-3200LL XMS Pro DDR400 (Athlon64)
1 GB Corsair 2xCMX512-3200LL XMS Pro DDR400 (P4 2.8)
1 GB Crucial 2x512MB DDR400 CL3 (P4 3.0)

SuperMicro SP-450 PSU (Opteron)
SilenX.com 400W 16 dB PSU (Athlon64)
Forton/SPI 300W ATX PSU - standard MicronPC (Pentium 4)
Monster Power HTS 3600 Power Conditioning

Windows XP Professional SP1

We did not have time to test the Pentium 4 3.0GHz on Corsair RAM, but the CL3 RAM is what is stock on many store-bought PCs, but Crucial ram is probably better than most generic. Don't worry, read through the entire article before you complain…

Final words before we show the numbers

Our focus on digital photography should be seen in two ways. If you're interested in digital photography, this will be an important evaluation of AMD versus Intel CPUs as well as a demonstration of the benefits of a dual processor system. If you're just interested in a "standard CPU" review, think of these as real-world synthetic tests of memory performance and FPU/SSE/MMX performance. All systems were running unfragmented hard drives. We had initially run these tests on a RAM drive to take the hard drive performance out of the equation, but found that for these tests, the hard drive performance was not significantly different between these ATA systems.