EVEREST Benchmark Tests

Lavalys EVEREST is an industry leading system diagnostics and benchmarking solution for enthusiasts PC users, based on the award-winning EVEREST Technology. During system optimizations and tweaking it provides essential system and overclock information, advanced hardware monitoring and diagnostics capabilities to check the effects of the applied settings. CPU, FPU and memory benchmarks are available to measure the actual system performance and compare it to previous states or other systems. Furthermore, complete software, operating system and security information makes EVEREST a comprehensive system diagnostics tool that offers a total of 100 pages of information about your PC.

All of the benchmarks used in our test bed rely on basic x86 instructions and consume very low system memory while also being aware of HyperThreading, multi-processors, and multi-core processors. While the EVEREST CPU tests really only compare the processor performance more than it measures platforms, it still offers a glimpse into what kind of power each platform possesses.

Queen and Photoworxx tests are synthetic benchmarks that operate the function many times and over-exaggerate by several magnitudes what the real-world performance would be like. The Queen benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and misprediction penalties of the CPU. It does this by finding possible solutions to the classic queen problem on a chessboard. At the same clock speed theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores.

The 100MHz speed difference between the Athlon-II X2-260 and the X2-255 doesn't impress much in the Queen scores. The increase in performance is only about 3%, whereas the Athlon-II X2-260 falls significantly behind the X3-445 by about 23%. It is obvious that the extra core holds quite an advantage over the higher 100MHz clock speed. The X3-445 has a clock speed of 3.1GHz, compared to the 3.2GHz of the X2-260. Even though the increase is only about 3% from the slower Athlon-II X2-255, the X2-260 maintains about the same ratio of score/MHz. When dividing the total score by their respective clock speeds, both dual-core CPUs end up with a score of about 3.7 per MHz, meaning that the performance increase is exactly in line with the increase in clock speed.

Like the Queen benchmark, the Photoworxx tests for penalties against pipeline architecture. The synthetic Photoworxx benchmark stresses the integer arithmetic and multiplication execution units of the CPU and also the memory subsystem. Due to the fact that this test performs high memory read/write traffic, it cannot effectively scale in situations where more than two processing threads are used. The EVEREST Photoworxx benchmark performs the following tasks on a very large RGB image:

• Fill
• Flip
• Rotate90R (rotate 90 degrees CW)
• Rotate90L (rotate 90 degrees CCW)
• Random (fill the image with random colored pixels)
• RGB2BW (color to black & white conversion)
• Difference
• Crop

Photoworxx tells a story similar story to the Queen tests with the Athlon-II X2-260 showing about a 1% gain over the slower dual-core processor, but also falling behind the triple-core X3-445 by about 16%. In this case, the X2-255 has a benchmark score per MHz score of 4.8, while the faster Athlon-II X2-260 averages 4.7 per MHz. Quite honestly, a 1% difference between the two scores is really within the margin of error and we can concur that both processors scored practically the same on the Photoworxx tests, and quite a bit behind the X3-445 at only $11 more. For both tests, even the overclocked X2-260 can't quite hold up even against a stock X3-445. When overclocked also, the X3-445 takes the day as far as entry-level, inexpensive processors are concerned.

The Zip Library test measures combined CPU and memory subsystem performance through the public ZLib compression library. ZLib is designed as a free lossless data compression library for use on virtually any computer hardware and operating system. The ZLib data format is itself portable across platforms and has a footprint independent of input data that can be reduced at some cost in compression.

The two dual-core processors are again neck and neck in the ZLib test, with the X2-260 showing a 3% increase over the X2-255. When broken down to the average benchmark score per MHz again, both processors end up at about 13.3, showing that the increased performance of the Athlon-II X2-260 is in line with its increased clock speed. The real show stopper here again is the triple-core processor that only costs $11 more than the Athlon-II X2-260. It marks up gains of over 44% above the X2-260.

The AES integer benchmark measures CPU performance using AES data encryption. It utilizes Vincent Rijmen, Antoon Bosselaers and Paulo Barreto's public domain C code in ECB mode and consumes 48 MB of memory.

If anything can be said about the performance of the Athlon-II X2-260 in the Everest Benchmark tests, it would be that the processor is consistent. In the AES test we see, once again, a 3% increase in performance over the X2-255, and falls short of the triple-core X3-445 by 45%. At the very least, the X2-260 does not disappoint by proving that it is exactly what it claims to be. A 100MHz faster version of the same CPU.

Once again, the floating point tests show the same trend. The Athlon-II X2-260 increases performance by 3% in the Julia tests, 5% in the Mandel tests, and 3% in the SinJulia tests. This might show a slight increase in performance in x64 bit processing, but not much. The stock X3-445 still outperforms even the overclocked Athlon-II X2-260, lending credence to the idea that the Everest Benchmarks give a nice advantage to more cores.

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