Intro/Testbed
It’s the competition between Intel and AMD that pushes Moore’s law and allows the end-user to buy higher performing CPUs at lower prices. Since the release of AMD’s Athlon CPU, we have seen the performance pendulum swing between the two manufacturers and we constantly hear fanboys from either sides justifying the superiority of their preferred manufacturer.
Lately, the Intel camp has been a little quiet and part of the reason for that is Intel’s recent announcement on hitting the brick wall with their Pentium4 CPU speeds. Thus, Intel is currently focused on optimizing their current Pentium4 line-up by adding more Cache, increasing FSB speeds and introducing dual-core CPUs to keep the competition going until something new comes along. It’s somewhat with that philosophy in mind that Intel released their 3.46GHz EE CPU along with the 925XE chipset motherboard that we’re looking at today.
The 3.46GHz CPU is based on the Gallatin core and is basically a Xeon with a 1066MHz (4 x 266MHz) FSB sold as a Pentium4. This was a bit surprising as the Gallatin is based on the older Northwood core and not the newer 0.90nm Prescott core that is used by all new Pentium4 CPUs. Besides the FSB speed bump, this CPU being an Extreme Edition, features 2MB of L3 cache which is over and above the L1 and L2 caches found is standard Pentium4 CPUs. Like most new CPUs by Intel, the 3.46GHz EE is packaged in an LGA775 format.
On the chipset side, the only modification made by Intel to the 925XE is the official support for 1066MHz FSB which will allow the new 3.46GHz CPU to run in sync with the DDR2-533MHz memory. In our opinion, Intel should not have released the original 925X chipset as that really didn’t offer any improvement over the 915 chipset. Instead, Intel should’ve waited for a couple of months and simply released this 925XE.
All that aside, lets take a look at the performance of this new CPU/chipset combo and see how it stacks up against other offerings by AMD and Intel. We used the nVidia 6800GT card and the Maxtor 80GB 7200RPM/8MB cache hard drive for all the tests. On the Pentium4 front, we used MSI's 915 and Gigabyte's 925X boards for the 3.4GHz CPU as well as Intel's 925XE Desktop board for 3.4GHz and 3.46GHz performance measurement. On the AMD side, the Gigabyte nForce4 SLI board was used to test the 3500+ and 4000+ CPU along with 2 x 512MB Corsair DDR400 modules with 2.0-2-2-5 timing. For Intel, we used OCZ's DDR2-666 modules with 4.0-4-4-12 timings. The lower timings on the DDR2 memory modules certainly put the Pentium4 CPUs at a slight disadvantage but unfortunately we dont have anything better for now.
PC Mark/Sandra
| PC Mark: CPU |
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| PC Mark: Memory |
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| Sandra: CPU1 |
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| Sandra: CPU2 |
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| Sandra: FPU1 |
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| Sandra: FPU2 |
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| Sandra: Memory1 |
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| Sandra: Memory2 |
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The 3.46GHz EE rules in PC Mark and the FSB bump to 1066MHz allows for a decent jump in memory bandwidth scores on the Pentium4 platform. However, synthetic benchmarks dont always paint a true picture.
3D Marks/Aquamark
| 3D Mark 2001SE |
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| 3D Mark 2003 |
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| 3D Mark 2005 |
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| Aquamark |
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Lots of people use 3D Marks and aquamark- again, a synthetic benchmark and from these tests above, we see the 3.46GHz P4 performing well- almost as good as the high-end Athlon64 CPUs. Lets look at some real world benchmarks starting with Gaming
Gaming Benchmarks
| Counter Strike: Source |
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| Doom 3 |
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| Far Cry |
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| UT 2004 |
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The differences certainly start appearing when we use actual games with the 3.46GHz CPU performing 6% to 17% lower than the Athlon64 4000+. Compared to the standard 3.4GHz P4, there is a 5% to 14% improvement.
Photoshop/Office/Mozilla/Nero/Winzip
| WB: Adobe Photoshop |
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| WB: Ahead Nero |
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| WB: Microsoft Office |
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| WB: Mozilla |
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| WB: Winzip |
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Standard everyday applications like Photoshop and Microsoft Office dont show much of a difference between the 3.46GHz CPU and the Athlon64 4000+ however some apps like Mozilla favour the Athlon64 while Winzip liked the Intel's newest chipset.
Audio/Video Encoding
| WB: Music Match Jukebox |
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| AutoGK: Divx Encoding |
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| WB: Microsoft Windows Media Encoder |
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From the above numbers, Intel should still be your number one choice if you encode Audio/Video heavily.
3D Workstation Performance
| Cinebench |
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| WB: Discreet 3D Studio (Direct-X) |
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| WB: Discreet 3D Studio (OpenGL) |
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The CPU performs decently in 3D Workstation apps as well and while the difference is pretty big in Cinebench, most of the other CPUs are not too far from each other in 3D Studio MAX
Conclusion
The benchmarks between a 3.4GHz Pentium4 and a 3.46GHz Pentium4 show a reasonable jump in performance- partly because of the FSB speed bump but mainly because of the additional L3 cache found in the Extreme Edition. And while this CPU posted pretty reasonable scores in almost all tests, you have to realize that we've compared it to the Athlon64 4000+ which is not AMD’s current top-of-the-line CPU. Compared to the FX55 which is AMD’s fastest, the 3.46GHz EE will probably fade further especially since both of these products are priced at similar levels- around the US$1000/- mark (ouch.) Its because of the very high pricing of this CPU that the performance starts to pale- the Athlon64 4000+ can be bought for about US$300 less while the Athlon64 3500+ and Pentium4 3.4GHz can bought for under US$300.
Intel does need to re-evaluate their plan for competing with AMD in the fastest desktop CPU department. While the move to 1066MHz FSB is good, we think that they need to bump cache levels across the entire Pentium4 line-up and not just restrict it to their Extreme Edition series. Prices also need to be dropped to compete better against the higher performing Athlon64. Lets hope that the upcoming Prescott based 1066MHz FSB CPUs along with the Glenwood/Lakeport chipsets help improve performances even further. Or better yet, maybe Intel can use their highly efficient Pentium-M core which is designed for notebooks and tweak it a bit to build a desktop CPU.
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