SYSmark2004 is a program that simulates the use of real-world applications. Thus, we consider this the best software to measure, in practical terms, the system performance.

The benchmarks are divided into two groups:

• Internet Content Creation: Simulates the authoring of a website containing text, images, videos and animations. The following programs are used: Adobe After Effects 5.5, Adobe Photoshop 7.01, Adobe Premiere 6.5, Discreet 3ds Max 5.1, Macromedia Dreamweaver MX, Macromedia Flash MX, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9, McAfee VirusScan 7.0 and Winzip 8.1.
• Office Productivity: Simulates the use of an office suite, i.e. simulates sending e-mails, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, etc. The following programs are used: Adobe Acrobat 5.05, Microsoft Office XP SP2, Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1, NaturallySpeaking 6, McAfee VirusScan 7.0 and Winzip 8.1.

This software delivers several results, all of them using a specific SYSmark2004 unit. First we have a SYSmark2004 overall score. Then we have a group result for each batch listed above. And for each batch, we have specific results: 3D Creation, 2D Creation and Web Publication for Internet Content Creation; and Communication, Document Creation and Data Analysis for Office Productivity.

For a better visualization, we separated the results into three graphs: overall score, Internet Content Creation score and Office Productivity score.

SYSmark2004 – Overall Score	Score	Difference
Core 2 Extreme X6800 (2.93 GHz)	347	2.36%
Core 2 Extreme QX6700 (2.66 GHz)	339
Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.66 GHz)	331	2.42%
Athlon 64 X2 5000+ (2.6 GHz)	260	30.38%
Pentium 4 550 (3.4 GHz)	195	73.85%
Pentium 4 640 (3.2 GHz)	186	82.26%

Core 2 Extreme X6800 was the CPU that achieved the highest overall performance on SYSmark2004, probably because some applications don’t take advantage of having more than two CPUs installed on the system. For this kind of application the CPU with the highest clock rate will be the fastest one. However, since the performance difference between Core 2 Extreme X6800 and Core 2 Extreme QX6700 was below 3%, we have to consider them to have the same performance level on this score.

Core 2 Extreme QX6700 achieved the same performance level of Core 2 Duo E6700, as both run at the same clock rate. Here we can also see how big is the performance difference between Intel dual-core CPUs against AMD dual-core CPUs (Core 2 Duo E6700 was 27% faster than Athlon X2 5000+ and both run at almost the same clock rate). On the above table you can see the performance difference; the numbers in the “difference” row refers to the performance difference from each CPU to Core 2 Extreme QX6700.

On Internet Content Creation batch overall results Core 2 Extreme QX6700 achieved the same performance level as Core 2 Extreme X6800, but Core 2 Extreme X6800 was a little bit faster (4.07%) on 3D Creation batch, probably for the same reason explained above. On all other results inside Internet Content Creation Core 2 Extreme QX6700 was faster, though. On the table above you can see the performance difference from Core 2 Extreme QX6700 to each CPU included on our review.

On Office Productivity batch, Core 2 Extreme QX6700 achieved a performance level lower than Core 2 Extreme X6800 for the reasons we have already explained. The reviewed CPU achieved the same performance level as Core 2 Duo E6700, which runs at the same clock rate (2.66 GHz) but on Communication batch, where E6700 was 5.52% faster than QX6700. On the table above you can see the performance difference from Core 2 Extreme QX6700 to each CPU included on our review.