One of the changes that the Pentium4 is supposed to go through is the bump to a 1066MHz System bus (or 266MHz FSB) from the current 800MHz (or 200MHz FSB). We’ve been wanting to test the P4 at 1066MHz FSB for some time now but the very limited overclocking abilities of the 915/925 chipsets prevented us from reaching such high speeds on any motherboards. Luckily, DFI sent us their 875P chipset board with an LGA775 socket and at the same time Corsair sent us some memory modules that work at DDR533 speed. We decided to use both of these components with our unlocked Pentium4 CPU to emulate a 1066MHz bus CPU.
The default multiplier on our P4 is 17x and the lowest is goes is 14x which is what we used to emulate the Pentium4 at 1066MHz bus (266 x 14 = 3724MHz.) Our internal tests showed the 875P chipset performing as well as the 915 chipset with identical configurations. In fact, in some benchmarks, we noticed the 875P performing slightly higher than the 915/925 chipsets. Thus, we have a reason to believe that an actual Pentium4 with a 1066MHz system bus on the upcoming 925 platform should perform identical to the results we obtained (provided Intel doesn’t change anything else like the amount of Cache.) The following is a CPU-Z shot of our CPU:
Since this is not exactly a retail product, we only decided to run CPU, Memory and gaming benchmarks. For comparison, we chose our CPU at its default speed of 3.4GHz on the Abit AA8-DuraMAX motherboard (925 chipset) as well as the AMD Athlon64 4000+ on the MSI K8N Neo motherboard (nForce3 chipset.) The following is the testbed used to evaluate the performances
