ScienceMark 2.0, Pifast, WAV crunching
We'll let our benchmark suite evaluate the mobile Barton's performance. Let's see how much performance £70 potentially buys you.
The bandwidth difference in running between at 166MHz and 216MHz, albeit in single-channel mode, is shown by the black and red bars above. We've simply kept the 11x multiplier and raised the front-side bus. We reiterate that our sample was fully mutliplier-unlocked, which most new Bartons aren't. That's a definite bonus for tweaking a system to the limit.
Pifast appears to be partial to a high-speed Barton. It manages to eclipse both the Athlon 64 Model 3000+ and Pentium 4 3.0GHz 800FSB processors with ease; processors which cost at least twice as much. It could also be argued that they'd comfortably beat out the overclocked mobile Barton when in an overclocked state themselves.
The Athlon 64 CPUs' performance-related features don't count for much in WAV encoding. The near-2.4GHz clock speed puts our £70 Barton at the top of the list. 607MB of U2 WAVs were crunched into 192KB/s MP3 format.
