64-bit Apple G5s trounced by Athlon 64s, Opterons

TESTS PUTTING an Athlon 64 FX-51, and a 2GHz dual Opteron up against a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 and two PowerMac G5 systems have AMD's 64-bit offerings mashing up the Apple and pulping the Pentium.

The Athlon 64 FX system outperforms the 64-bittish G5 systems in most of the benchmarks, including Premiere 6, Word, and Quake III. Apple-friendly Photoshop, still performs best on the platform, though, the dual G5 managing a 15 per cent performance lead over the Athlon 64 FX-51.

The dual Opteron system however, beats the dual G5 in other Photoshop tests.

PC World said systems with the FX-51 showed "pronounced improvements in some of our more CPU-intensive tests, particularly AutoCAD, where they were about 44 percent faster, on average, than the P4 unit".

The FX-51 PCs also "stood out on our Premiere tests, and posted top scores on the Photoshop and VideoWave tests. The P4-based PC had the best score in our Musicmatch test".

In PC World's game tests, the FX-51 PCs were "clear winners", posting noticeably higher scores.

The tests kick off here. µ