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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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.