Pentium 4 3.46 Extreme Edition and 925XE: 1066MHz FSB Support is Here
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 31, 2004 3:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
The Test
Given that there's pretty much no performance benefit to the 1066MHz FSB as we've illustrated in the previous pages, we will offer the next several pages of benchmarks only as a reference point to show how the 3.46EE stacks up to the CPUs we compared in our most recent CPU review, but without our usual commentary. Based on what you've already seen, it should be no surprise that the 3.46EE is really no faster than the 3.4EE, but if you would like to see all of the individual benchmarks feel free to flip through the coming pages. Those who aren't interested should feel free to skip directly to the conclusion.
In addition to our usual tests we've included PC World's WorldBench 5, an application based test suite much like Winstone and SYSMark that incorporates many popular applications. Unlike the aforementioned benchmarks, WorldBench does not test multitasking power, rather focusing on single application performance, making it very complementary to our existing benchmarks. The one thing to keep in mind about the WorldBench results is that the variation between test runs can be pretty significant; we do everything to make sure that the results are as consistent as possible (multiple runs, throwing out outliers, etc...) but the variation between runs in these tests can be as high as 6% - thus we would suggest looking at performance differences only greater than 10% in these tests for any sort of significance. The rest of the tests have variations between runs of 1 - 3%.
Our hardware configurations are similar what we've used in previous comparisons, with one addition - our Athlon 64 testbed now uses the recently released nForce4 chipset. For a review of that chipset read our own Wesley Fink's review of NVIDIA's latest chipset with SLI support.
AMD Athlon 64 Configuration
Socket-939 Athlon 64 CPUs
2 x 512MB OCZ PC3200 EL Dual Channel DIMMs 2-2-2-10
NVIDIA nForce4 Reference Motherboard
ATI Radeon X800 XT PCI Express
AMD Athlon XP Configuration
Athlon XP 3200+
2 x 512MB OCZ PC3200 EL Dual Channel DIMMs 2-2-2-10
ASUS A7N8X Deluxe nForce2 400 Motherboard
ATI Radeon X800 XT AGP
Intel Pentium 4 Configuration
LGA-775 Intel Pentium 4 and Extreme Edition CPUs
2 x 512MB Crucial DDR-II 533 Dual Channel DIMMs 3-3-3-12
Intel D925XECV2 Motherboard (we used the same board for 1066MHz FSB and 800MHz FSB tests
ATI Radeon X800 XT PCI Express
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IntelUser2000 - Monday, November 1, 2004 - link
Intel is not doing bad. They are doing terrible. So terrible that you might as well call them dead. Probably will last till 2009 before they fill bankruptcy.To those people who say people in forums don't know anything and that there are other people stupid enough to buy Intel chips(I mean all Intel chips): Uhh, yeah, get your head straight, since AMD is closing with Intel very rapidly in marketshare, in server, desktop, and laptop, and that means that gamers actually do make a difference(albeit slowly) making other people buy computers. You think other people will buy P4's because of high clock speed? That's BS, since people who is stupid enough to buy Intel chips don't even know what clock speeds does. There are only a very few that knows computers JUST enough to say clock speed is good.
Tides - Monday, November 1, 2004 - link
believe me, everyone wants the best they can get for the least cash.FinalFantasy - Monday, November 1, 2004 - link
Intel is not doing good right now. I know a lot of people rested their hopes for Intel to strike back with the release of this chip. But alas, we are still seeing the same problems with this chip as we've seen with it's predecessors.1. Way overpriced
2. Still getting whooped by AMD's 64-bit chips
The choice is clear here, buy an average AMD chip for a fraction of the price and still be able to outperform your friend's Intel EE based machine that he spent $2,500-3,000 on to build, while you spent about $1,500 (factor in price a person pays for an Intel EE chip and a couple of sticks of DDR2).
Pandaren - Monday, November 1, 2004 - link
What the community here forgets is that the common person doesn't care for 10 extra FPS in a game or 3 seconds faster on that photoshop filter. They want a reliable, dependable computer with good support at a reasonable price.Dell provides that with Intel chips. People honestly don't care if the Intel chip is not faster.
Those of us who do care about performance and price/performance will build our own. I replaced my Dell with a homebuilt AMD box for that reason, but I don't expect everyone to do the same.
SLIM - Monday, November 1, 2004 - link
"SLIMYou're forgetting DDR2 price which this needs in your so called Intel is "cheaper" comparison. If you want the same price setup you can get a FX-55 and really bring the wood."
ZEBO
Perhaps you didn't read my post correctly or didn't read the review, but the first paragraph in post #14 is a direct quote from the review (that's why there are QUOTATION MARKS around it). The two comments below the QUOTE were my views on Anand's conclusion of the 560 v 3800 comparison at the end of the review. Your comment actually agrees with what I said.
Tides - Monday, November 1, 2004 - link
they would if they had itswatX - Monday, November 1, 2004 - link
why doesnt intel just release a dual core platform or a 64bit chip already..gezz its like they are acting like ATI "we will release 64-vit chips only when apps start to use it" ...NotMrT - Monday, November 1, 2004 - link
Last time i remember AMD domminating this much was in the time of the thunderbirdsChapbass - Monday, November 1, 2004 - link
#43:One thing that i can vouch for, being a college student: Almost every college student not "in the know" with building systems buys a dell....because theyre sold through the college. At least my college they are. DEFINITELY the most common systems around here (and it makes me sick) : P.
It seems like households are more into HP/compaq, where schools, both k-12 and college, are totally dell.
Just something ive noticed around where im from. YMMV.
-Chap
justly - Sunday, October 31, 2004 - link
I find it interesting that the page compareing an A64 3800+ to the P4 560 shows the P4 winning the multitasking content creation. Well that isn't the interesting part, but the fact that Intel only won this because it took all three SYSmark tests is (the SYSmark tests wher the only thing Intel won in this catagory). I guess what really amuses me is remembering a comment in a article a while back (I think it was Anand himself who made the comment) implying that the SYSmark scores did not reflect the rest of their testing and that it seemed to favor Intel.