Before we delve into benchmarking results we wanted to explain what we measured and why. For starters we’re not going to bore you with comparing the Athlon XP 3000+ with every flavor of Pentium 4 under the sun but will rather pit it against it’s archrival; the 3.06GHz Pentium 4 with HyperThreading as that’s what AMD intended with the 3000+ performance rating.

System configuration AMD Athlon XP

- Asus A7N8X motherboard, Nvidia Nforce2 chipset
- 2 x 256MB DDR400 Cas-2 Corsair XMS3200 memory
- AMD Athlon XP 2700+ processor, 333MHz FSB
- AMD Athlon XP 3000+ processor, 333MHz FSB
- ATI Radeon 9700 Pro videocard
- Western Digital WD800BB hard disk, 80GB
- Toshiba SD-M-1612 DVD/CD-rom
- Windows XP Pro, with SP1
- ATI Catalyst 3.2 drivers

System configuration Intel Pentium 4

- Asus P4G8X motherboard, E7205 chipset
- 2 x 256MB DDR400 Cas-2 Corsair XMS3200 memory
- Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz processor, 533MHz FSB
- ATI Radeon 9700 Pro videocard
- Western Digital WD800BB hard disk, 80GB
- Toshiba SD-M-1612 DVD/CD-rom
- Windows XP Pro, with SP1
- ATI Catalyst 3.2 drivers

Second point to note is that we find it pointless to use benchmarks that are several years old, for example Winstone 2001 has long since been past the expiration date and does not include support for many of the new features found in the latest processors. Thus using such a benchmark as means of determining a processor' performance doesn't make sense, as the results aren't the same with modern operating systems such as Windows XP and modern benchmarks such as SYSmark 2002.