20. Studio 9 Plus (Video Encoding And Processing)

Pinnacle Systems' Studio 9 Plus is a favorite video editing software solution. This program is also interesting for benchmarking because its developers usually seek to take advantage of new CPU functions and instructions, such as SSE3. Despite SSE3 optimized code, the Turion 64 has to surrender first place to the Pentium M in this benchmark, and confess itself soundly beaten. The Mobile Sempron looks even worse in this comparison, and like its big brother the Turion 64 scales only a little when faster RAM is installed.

Sysmark 2004 SE (Office System Benchmark)

Bapco's Symark2004 SE measures the total system performance of computers engaged in office and Internet tasks. The Intel system emerges from this test as the anticipated winner. Its large L2 cache reduces the load involved in running parallel program, and from loading and unloading multiple applications. This is also mirrored in the observation that the Turion 64 bests the Mobile Sempron for the same reason. In this arena, the AMD CPUs performance results scaled upward when faster RAM was installed. But whether Sysmark scores are up or down, in the real world our experience is that it's immaterial whether a system earns a score of 145 or 157. In fact, the AMD and the Intel systems all deliver much more performance than an average user will need in a normal working day.