As probably one of our more popular desktop professional application tests, WorldBench 5's Photoshop 7 test module is next.

PC World's World Bench 5.0: Photoshop 7 & Windows Media Encoder More Real-World Application Performance

If our WorldBench 5 Office XP tests were all about clock speed, then it's fair to say that the Photoshop 7 WB5 test modules is anything but.  Here's another big sweep by the Athlon 64 delegation.  There's a 24-second delta (about 8%) between the fastest score put up by the new Pentium 4 670 and AMD's flagship single-core chip, the FX-55.  Even the A64 4000+ takes the 670 to task with about a 3-4% speed advantage.

We continued our testing with WB5's video encoding benchmark based on Windows Media Encoder 9.  In the Windows Media Encoder 9 portion of the WorldBench 5 suite, encoding times are again recorded in number of seconds to complete a conversion to Windows Streaming Media format.  Lower times indicate better performance.

WME9 is both SSE optimized and multi-threaded.  Here it's the battle of the Dual Core CPUs, with the new AMD Athlon 64 4800+ leaving all competitors completely in its dust.  The 4800+ clocks in a full minute faster than the Pentium EE 840 dual-core processor.  Probably more interesting is how heavily optimized for multi-threading this test is, as is evident in the scores between the Pentium 4 670 at 3.8GHz versus the dual core Pentium EE 840 with its two 3.2GHz cores.  The 840 is only faster than the 670 by about 3%, but when you consider its 600MHz clock speed deficit, the benefits of multi-threading and multi-core performance are obvious.