Synthetic Testing (2)
The PCmark2005 processor test showed the Pentium 4 660 system configuration to be much quicker than the Aurora m9700. This is another synthetic benchmark that relies heavily on memory bandwidth and seems to be biased towards higher clocked processors, as a result the 2.40GHz Turion64 has no chance. It is interesting to note that in the 3Dmark2001 SE results the Aurora m9700 is just 11% faster with SLI enabled. This is interesting because the 3Dmark2003 test shows the SLI enabled configuration to be 70% faster.
Since 3Dmark2001 looks more at the entire package rather than just the graphics cards, I am not surprised to see that it indicated very little difference once SLI was enabled. Clearly the Turion64 ML-44 processor is creating some serious bottlenecking. The 3Dmark2003 benchmark looks more at graphics card performance and in doing so removes processor and memory bandwidth limitations.