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Intel's Pentium 4 3.4GHz Processors Reviewed
EconolineCrush writes "In one of the most gratuitous benchmarking indulgences I've seen, Tech Report has tested Intel's new Northwood and Prescott Pentium 4 3.4GHz processors against sixteen competitors ranging from the relatively old school Athlon XP to the opulent Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, with plenty of Athlon 64 action thrown in for good measure. Performance is tested in a wide range of applications, including gaming, rendering, image processing, media encoding, speech recognition, and scientific number crunching. Even if you're not interested in Intel's latest Pentium 4s, the review nicely shows where 18 of the fastest desktop chips from AMD and Intel stack up against each other."
Thanks to Corsair for providing us with memory for our testing. If you're looking to tweak out your system to the max and maybe overclock it a little, Corsair's RAM is definitely worth considering.
Boy... I wonder how much memory Corsair donated for that wonderful little plug.
I can tolerate Coke planting their product in sit-coms... but I don't think I would appreciate my newscaster saying "Coke is so refreshing" in the middle of a news story.
Planting an obvious ad in the middle of "journalism" is just wrong.
Davak
If you end up building your own system, you're right. However, there are still plenty of low-end graphics cards that companies stick into computers just to save another 50 bucks in the manufacturing cycle. When this happens, you still have the "top-of-the-line" graphics chipset, but the board doesn't have its own processor. Without the onboard processor, the CPU does matter.
I remember a story in Wired a year or two ago that detailed how nvidia's CEO (or was it CTO.. it was a while ago) envisioned most of the workload for the computer on the graphics card, and the main CPU not needing to be very powerful. I wonder what he's thinking nowadays?
While all that processor speed is mighty good, who needs top-of-the-line equipment anymore? The new games all rely on the GFX card rather than the CPU. Any suggestions, other than the fact that Intel is keeping up to Moore's law?
Many non-game apps are CPU bound, and speed is always desired in these situations. Examples include rendering, video compression, SETI@Home, etc. Likely you don't need a faster processor, but it doesn't mean that the business world sees it the same way. Heck, maybe some day these processors will power your graphics card too!
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After all, tomorrow never comes, especially in the Computing world.
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Taking the opportunity for a moment to troll, flame bait and be an annoying Apple user, I think it's worth commenting how piss-poor the P4's LinPack performance is. The Apple Xserve G5 gets 4.5 Gigaflops out of each of it's two 2GHz G5 processor when running HPC Linpack, as opposed to the 3.4GHx P4 "Extreme Edition" which peaks at just 1.3 Gigaflops. Anyone looking to do serious scientific calculations rather than just playing Quake should not be using Intel hardware these days; it just doesn't keep up with the PPC G5 for floating point.
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This doesn't make sense. So you're saying that since some of the computers we can buy will come with a lousy graphic card, there's use for those cpus that costs 750+$?
How about buying the version of the computer with the 150$ cpu and switching the video card for a 150$ mid-end card from ATI or Nvidia? You'd wipe the floor with the 3.4EE computer with a lousy graphic card, and save 450$.
And also, how can you have both a "low-end graphic card" and a "top-of-the-line" graphic chipset? No offense, but the more I read your post the less insightful it gets.
Well, so far you've made the case for a vector processor, or an add on like AltiVec. How's about making one for a faster CPU?
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You bring up an excellent point, and one that I wonder about.
At some point, the Slashdot/Ars/Tom's crowd and others who are a little more informed will identify the 'last great un-hobbled processor', i.e. the fastest thing you can buy before the Palladium/DRM stuff starts to become baked into the CPUs. Right now it looks like AMD and Intel will both be using some kind of Trusted (ahem) platform and BIOS. A lot of people will buy that processor(s) and then there will be a drop-off. As it is, not too many people get excited about the difference between 3 and 3.4 Ghz... ask yourself, which would you buy: a 'non-trusted' 3Ghz CPU or a DRM'd 3.4ghz?
Of course the unwashed masses will not know the difference (it makes the interweb go fastar!!!!111!!1)... but the alpha geeks are the ones who pay the premium for the latest gear so AMD/Intel may actually register a hit in sales.
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Examples include rendering, video compression,
And lets not forget the fact that some of us like to listen to our own background music while playing a game on the computer duing the time it takes for our favorited DVD authoring applications to encode the video.
Actually, I tend to take the results more seiously when the tester demonstrates they understand the limitations of the tests used and lays it on the line.