PCMark 2002 was released a couple of years ago by Madonion (now Futuremark) the makers of 3DMark. It allows users to benchmark their Hard Drive, Memory and Processor under a variety of tests which are designed to show how the system will perform in home and office tasks.

Opteron 146 (IDE HD, 4x512mb ddr266)

 

AXP 3200+ (IDE HD, 2x256mb DDR400) - below

In PCMark2002 the CPU results are very close, with the Athlon XP just piping the Opteron by 10 points. The HD score is slightly higher on the Opteron system using the same drive, this is most likely caused by a better implementation of IDE on the Opteron test system. In the memory scores the Opteron really shines, despite using slower DDR266 against the Athlon XP’s DDR 400 the Opteron provides far greater performance, 3000 points more.

(NOTE: reducing the amount of memory on the Opteron did not affect the score whilst dual channel was being used.)

 

Opteron 146 (1x512 ddr266) - below

Moving to single channel memory rather than dual channel on the Opteron system the Opteron still outscores the Athlon XP which is using Dual channel DDR 400 by a large margin – 1217 points.

Finally, if we move up to 1x512mb DDR333 on the Opteron system the increase is huge over the system using single channel ddr266, almost 700 points.

 

Next: AMD Nbench3