Memory performance

The Athlon XP 2100+/KT333 platform has a 33MHz memory clock speed advantage and VIA's more aggressive memory controller. That gives it more memory bandwidth than the 760MPX chipset can muster. Keep in mind that extra memory bandwidth hasn't done much for the real world performance of current-generation Athlons, so this disparity isn't the end of the world for the GPG X2.

Cache sizes and speeds are identical between Athlon MP and XP processors, so the Linpack graphs for each system are identical until matrix sizes increase to the point where the memory bus becomes the bottleneck.

Business Winstone

Business Winstone doesn't use any SMP-aware applications, nor does it task the disk subsystem enough for the GPG X2's RAID array to have much of an impact. If all you're doing is word processing and basic office tasks, the GPG X2 is definitely overkill.

Content Creation Winstone

The GPG X2 takes its first victory in CC Winstone, but it's almost a photo finish. Multimedia content creation applications should be the GPG X2's bread and butter as a graphics and video workstation.

In the most recent Content Creation Winstone, the GPG X2 starts to distance itself from our Athlon XP 2100+/KT333 system. The GPG X2's RAID array and second processor team up on our lowly single-drive, single-processor comparison system to yield a much better overall performance.