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
Multitasking Content Creation
MCC Winstone 2004
Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 tests the following applications in various usage scenarios:
. Adobe® Photoshop® 7.0.1
. Adobe® Premiere® 6.50
. Macromedia® Director MX 9.0
. Macromedia® Dreamweaver MX 6.1
. Microsoft® Windows MediaTM Encoder 9 Version 9.00.00.2980
. NewTek's LightWave® 3D 7.5b
. SteinbergTM WaveLabTM 4.0f
As you can see above, Lightwave is part of the MCC Winstone 2004 benchmark suite. As an individual application, Lightwave does manage to get a healthy performance benefit with multithreaded rendering enabled, especially when paired with Hyperthreading enabled CPUs like the Pentium 4s here today. All chips were tested with Lightwave set to spawn 4 threads.
There's a slight boost here, but the 3.46EE is still slower than the Athlon 64 3400+.
ICC SYSMark 2004
The first category that we will deal with is 3D Content Creation. The tests that make up this benchmark are described below:
The 3.46EE comes within striking distance of the Pentium 4 560 but doesn't have what it takes to dethrone it."The user renders a 3D model to a bitmap using 3ds max 5.1, while preparing web pages in Dreamweaver MX. Then the user renders a 3D animation in a vector graphics format."
Next, we have 2D Content Creation performance:
"The user uses Premiere 6.5 to create a movie from several raw input movie cuts and sound cuts and starts exporting it. While waiting on this operation, the user imports the rendered image into Photoshop 7.01, modifies it and saves the results. Once the movie is assembled, the user edits it and creates special effects using After Effects 5.5."
The Internet Content Creation suite is rounded up with a Web Publishing performance test:
"The user extracts content from an archive using WinZip 8.1. Meanwhile, he uses Flash MX to open the exported 3D vector graphics file. He modifies it by including other pictures and optimizes it for faster animation. The final movie with the special effects is then compressed using Windows Media Encoder 9 series in a format that can be broadcast over broadband Internet. The web site is given the final touches in Dreamweaver MX and the system is scanned by VirusScan 7.0."
Mozilla + Media Encoder
While AMD dominated in WorldBench 5's Mozilla test, encoding a file using Windows Media Encoder in the background not only makes this test more appreciative of the Pentium 4 but also of Hyper Threading.
Thanks to the multitasking nature of this benchmark there's a 6% performance advantage that the 3.46EE enjoys over the 3.4EE, which is greater than what we saw in the dedicated 1066MHz FSB tests. There are two factors at work here; for one we're looking at a higher clock speed thus taking better advantage over the 1066MHz FSB and at the same time there's a pretty large variance between runs in most of the WorldBench benchmarks so the numbers here aren't too surprising.
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Beenthere - Sunday, October 31, 2004 - link
Intel has simply run out of Hail Mary solutions to their unending design, engineering, production, sales, management, and marketing problems. Even Wall Street knows this by now.Wesley Fink - Sunday, October 31, 2004 - link
For those who asked, the 1000 lot Intel price for the 3.46EE is $999.coldpower27 - Sunday, October 31, 2004 - link
Well you could get a direct comparison between the Athlon 64 3700+ vs the Pentium 4 560 as those 2 processors are priced pretty directly against each other on Newegg, though their MSRP differ in actuality.64Bit Windows isn't likely to be released until Prescott 2M with Intel EM64T is released in Q1 2005. We will have to see though if Microsoft will released in 2005 WinXP 64.
jimmy43 - Sunday, October 31, 2004 - link
#14 I was thinking the same thing. The 3500 would probably still win or tie in most of the categories and it costs nearly half the price of an intel 560. I feel like Anand is trying to be fair to both companies and reccomending a bit of both. Realistically, AMD has Intel beat in every market segment... by alot. It's also funny how everyone is COMPLETELY forgetting that AMD's proccessors are 64 bit so in a year or so, you will get a considerable free speed boost and youl be able to run the latest OS. Is that not a huge advantage? Come on, people need to stop overlooking that its really bugging me.DukeN - Sunday, October 31, 2004 - link
Once again, Intel shows why it's the Sony of the CPU world with terrible products terribly overpriced.Gnoad - Sunday, October 31, 2004 - link
I might have missed it, but how much will Intel price this at? Considering it's an EE, one can guess about $900. If thats true, they MIGHT sell 3 or 4 of them.skunkbuster - Sunday, October 31, 2004 - link
underdog in terms of market shareGhandiInstinct - Sunday, October 31, 2004 - link
Since when did the world spin where a chip that is superior in 90% of chip tasks is the underdog?stephenbrooks - Sunday, October 31, 2004 - link
So... I was thinking of investing some money in shares. You don't think AMD might happen to be a good bet right around now, would you?SLIM - Sunday, October 31, 2004 - link
Great review as always, but there's always room for improvement:)[/begin nitpicking]
"So in the end, who takes the crown? AMD or Intel? The 3800+ took four category wins, while the Pentium 4 560 only took two, however with the exception of the gaming and professional apps category, AMD's victories were not overwhelming - especially once you take into account the fact that the 3800+ is priced much higher than the Pentium 4 560. Now that you can purchase at least a couple of 915 based motherboards for less than $130 the total cost of ownership for the Intel platform doesn't eat into the CPU price advantage. For the most part we'd say the 3800+ is faster than the Pentium 4 560 but not always worth the added cost. It's unusual but in many cases, the Pentium 4 560 is actually the bargain high-end chip of the two."
Alrighty, two comments:
1) It's bad science to make a detailed comparison, and then in the conclusion talk about switching the chipset and memory in order to make the price comparison hold up. (Maybe include the numbers from a 915 review to back up the assertion that the 560 will still perform just as well with 915/DDR).
2) I'd be curious to see how the 3500+ would hold up in these same comparisons since it is about $150 cheaper than the 560.
Bonus nitpick:
4 of the graphs don't include the new 3.46ee (ACD on page 9 and 3 games benches); I don't know if that was intentional or not. [/end nitpicking]
Thanks again for the best reviews.