comparing two CPUs side by side: diverging results

How can I compare two CPUs to see which one is faster? I know the answer to this will probably depend on the type of application/benchmark used, however I would guess that in most cases you can decide which one is generally faster.

The reason I'm posting this instead of checking benchmarks for myself is that I am confused by these two charts (the only ones that I found to actually rank several CPU models in the same searchable list):
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Processors-Benchmarklist.2436.0.html
and
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php
The two lists seem to contradict each other quite often. For example, in the first list, the Intel Pentium Dual Core T3200 (rank: 91) seems to be well slower than the Intel Core2 Duo T5800 (rank: 56), while in the second list, T3200 even gets a higher passmark (1049) than T5800 does (1002).

Also, looking just at the first list, it seems the T8300 (rank: 28) is faster than the T8400 (rank: 35). It would make sense that the higher model number would also be faster. I'd be prepared to trust these charts that this isn't actually how Intel names their products, but I'd expect to see more or less similar results in different charts.

So which of these two (if any) should be trusted?

 

notebook check and pasmark are not very accurate. Passmark said that a T2500 was faster than a T5300, but when using both in the same laptop, the T5300 completely detroyed the T2500 in every test.

The only way to see the difference, is to get sissandra or pcmark benchies for each system

I can tell you right now, that a T5800 is faster than a T3200, and a T8400 is faster than a T8300

K-TRON

 

Hi, thanks for your reply. Unfortunately, I cannot perform these tests myself since those CPUs are potential buys which I'd like to compare. This is why I was hoping there'd be an easy, reliable way to tell which is faster, rather than asking people's advice for each possible pair of CPUs that I need to compare

 

a lot of it comes down to the application being run and the processors used, a T3200 isn't smoking fast but in applications that don't make strong use of memory or l2 cache and just need raw cpu power it's not going to be much slower than any other 2ghz clocked Core2 based cpu. If you have some idea what you want out of the cpu (what apps to run, good battery life or is battery life not important, etc) im sure our users could make some good suggestions on what cpus you should be looking at.

 

The CPUs that you are comparing have little to no difference in performance.

A T3200 (2000 1024 667) and the T5800 (2000 2048 800) perform almost the same. L2 Cache makes a tiny difference in performance, which will be noticeable when running heavily CPU-intensive tasks (for e.g. benchmarks).

A T8300 (2400 3072 800) should actually be faster than a P8400 (2266 3072 1066), since the former has a higher clock frequency, but the much higher FSB on the P8400 makes it faster in overall performance. Though the difference won't be noticeable in day-to-day tasks. But the P8400, has a lower TDP of 25W which would make the run P8400 run cooler, when under load.

 

just look at core clocks higher is better l2 cache more is better and FSB as long as your mobo can handle it more is better. core clocks are probably best performance indicater, BUT NOT THE ONLY FACTOR...

MORMEGIL83