General Performance

First of all we used SYSMark 2004 SE test to assess the performance of the integrated systems.

The platforms built around Core 2 Duo E6300 processor proved faster than the alternative solutions with AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+. And it depends not on the performance of the integrated graphics cores, but on the superiority of the CPUs with Core micro-architecture over the AMD competitors, which we have already pointed out numerous times in our previous articles.

PCs with integrated graphics onboard are very often sued as Internet clients. Therefore, we decided to pay special attention to the platforms performance when working in typical Internet applications. Here we used WebMark 2004 benchmark that measures the reaction (response) time of the system when surfing different web-sites created using various contemporary Internet technologies, such as (Macromedia Flash, Shockwave, Javascript, Java, DHTML, SSL, .NET, etc.).

And again platforms built with Intel components can boast better performance thanks to processors on Core micro-architecture. Moreover, it is quite curious to see iG965 based platform falling behind i945G based one. Looks like the result in this test also depends on the 2D performance of the integrated graphics cores. Under typical Internet workload the 2D performance of the older chipset turns out higher.

Besides the tests that generate integral performance index, we have also tested out platforms in a number of popular sound and video encoding applications, final rendering tasks and image editing programs.

The situation is pretty typical. The graphics performance is of minimal influence here, while the performance advantage of the Core 2 Duo E6300 processor over the Athlon 64 X2 4200+ is evident even with a naked eye.

Final rendering is the only task where AMD platform can boast better results than the competitor’s solution.