11. Benchmarks And Results

We'll describe the benchmarks we ran one at a time, followed by a display of results from our test builds for that benchmark, along with the conclusions we drew from those results and any observations we made along the way. We've been running some of these benchmarks (or variants thereof) long enough that these observations may often be more interesting than conclusions to which the results lead us, though it's clear that price and overall performance are strongly related, as you'd expect (or hope) them to be.

PCMark05

PCMark05 is a set of synthetic benchmarks that simulate various kinds of workloads for PCs to tackle. Though these ratings do not necessarily reflect real-life performance, they do provide a useful basis for comparing across multiple systems, such as the four builds we put together for this story. In the charts and table that follows we report measurements for CPU, Memory, HDD, audio compression and video encoding, all of which have some relevance to media PC behavior.

We present PCMark05 audio compression and video encoding results in the following table.

Looking at these results, we don't see the kinds of differences we expected between the Intel CPUs and their AMD counterparts. Rather, we observe near-parity across the board with a slight to modest edge to the AMD-based systems.