Intel Pentium 4 6xx and 3.73EE: Favoring Features Over Performance
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on February 21, 2005 6:15 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
The Test
Our hardware configurations are similar to what we've used in previous comparisons.
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
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 925XE Motherboard
ATI Radeon X800 XT PCI Express
Business/General Use Performance
Business Winstone 2004
Business Winstone 2004 tests the following applications in various usage scenarios:
. Microsoft Access 2002
. Microsoft Excel 2002
. Microsoft FrontPage 2002
. Microsoft Outlook 2002
. Microsoft PowerPoint 2002
. Microsoft Project 2002
. Microsoft Word 2002
. Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition 2003
. WinZip 8.1
Office Productivity SYSMark 2004
SYSMark's Office Productivity suite consists of three tests, the first of which is the Communication test. The Communication test consists of the following:
"The user receives an email in Outlook 2002 that contains a collection of documents in a zip file. The user reviews his email and updates his calendar while VirusScan 7.0 scans the system. The corporate web site is viewed in Internet Explorer 6.0. Finally, Internet Explorer is used to look at samples of the web pages and documents created during the scenario."
The next test is Document Creation performance, which shows very little difference in drive performance between the contenders:
"The user edits the document using Word 2002. He transcribes an audio file into a document using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 6. Once the document has all the necessary pieces in place, the user changes it into a portable format for easy and secure distribution using Acrobat 5.0.5. The user creates a marketing presentation in PowerPoint 2002 and adds elements to a slide show template."
The final test in our Office Productivity suite is Data Analysis, which BAPCo describes as:
"The user opens a database using Access 2002 and runs some queries. A collection of documents are archived using WinZip 8.1. The queries' results are imported into a spreadsheet using Excel 2002 and are used to generate graphical charts."
Microsoft Office XP SP-2
Here we see in that the purest of office application tests, performance doesn't vary all too much.
Mozilla 1.4
Quite possibly the most frequently used application on any desktop is the one we pay the least amount of attention to when it comes to performance. While a bit older than the core that is now used in Firefox, performance in Mozilla is worth looking at as many users are switching from IE to a much more capable browser on the PC - Firefox.
ACD Systems ACDSee PowerPack 5.0
ACDSee is a popular image editing tool that is great for basic image editing options such as batch resizing, rotating, cropping and other such features that are too elementary to justify purchasing something as powerful as Photoshop for. There are no extremely complex filters here, just pure batch image processing.
Ahead Software Nero Express 6.0.0.3
While it was a major issue in the past, these days buffer underrun errors while burning a CD or DVD are few and far between thanks to high performance CPUs as well as vastly improved optical drives. When you take the optical drive out of the equation, how do these CPU's stack up with burning performance?
As you'd guess, they're all pretty much the same, with the slight variations between chips falling within expectations. Any of these chips will do just fine.
Winzip
Archiving performance ends up being fairly CPU bound as well as I/O limited.
WinRAR 3.40
Pulling the hard disk out of the equation we can get a much better idea of which processors are truly best suited for file compression.
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L3p3rM355i4h - Monday, February 21, 2005 - link
#30 90mm SOI= lower wattage.Brian23 - Monday, February 21, 2005 - link
Look at the power consumption graph for the A64. Why is the 3500 winchester doing so much better than the 3000 and 3200 winchesters?L3p3rM355i4h - Monday, February 21, 2005 - link
#28 saw almost the same thing at PCPER too.Aenslead - Monday, February 21, 2005 - link
I could ALMOST swear I saw the VERY same bencmarks last night @ xbit labs... fancy that.bldckstark - Monday, February 21, 2005 - link
227 WATTS!!... My daughter has a crayon maker. It uses a 60W light bulb in a plastic box to melt 3 crayons and pours them into a mold. It melts the wax in about 5 minutes. If I buy a P4 I can melt 11.35 crayons at once. It uses 3.78 times as much energy as is necessary to light my computer room. This is not efficient use of resources.L3p3rM355i4h - Monday, February 21, 2005 - link
sorry to go off topic, but are the forums down or does this terminal suck?LoneWolf15 - Monday, February 21, 2005 - link
From a price/performance standpoint, I can't see many good reasons to buy a P4 six series, and in many cases, a five series either (exceptions being high-end 3D rendering apps and heavy video encoding). Not just because of what price of processor (which doesn't seem to net a huge speed increase) but the increased power draw means a heavier power supply, plus more expensive cooling. Compared to the lower power draw of the Athlon 64 CPU's, as well as a lower price at least at the entry-to-mid level CPU's, I think Intel really needs to go back to basics and create a new CPU architecture.mlittl3 - Monday, February 21, 2005 - link
Okay, I have an addition to my last comment made about the Extreme Edition being a scam. I did some calculations that were left out my anandtech to see if the 3.73EE is truely better than the 3.46EE.Everyone knows the differences between the two processors. The 3.73EE has an 8% increase in CPU speed, less total cache overall but 4x the lower latency L2 cache when compared to L3 cache (the XD-bit and EM64T are also added but that will not effect performance at all with 32-bit OS).
With these added features, the 3.73EE should be better than the 3.46EE especially since the Prescott core is supposed to scale well with clock speed versus the Gallatin/Northwood and the 1066 MHz FSB is supposed to give better performance at higher clock speeds. Well, let's look at the numbers.
Using Anandtech's results, I calculated the % difference between the two processors. They varied between -10 (worse) and 30 % (better). I then added up all the scores (I took the inverse of the less is better scores) and divided them by the introduction price ($999) and the MHz of each processor. Here are the results.
Performance per $:
3.46EE - 20.69
3.73EE - 20.61
Performance per MHz:
3.46EE - 5.96
3.73EE - 5.52
You can do the calculations yourself by using all the benchmark numbers from the two extreme edition CPUs in the review. As you can see, the 3.73EE is worse on a per dollar and per MHz basis compared to the 3.46EE (even though the margin is small, it is still worse for the higher clocked CPU). The Prescott core is a failure IMHO. The 3.73EE is a total scam and the extreme edition processors in general are poor performers. Remember these were released just to offset the marketing of AMD FX processors when Intel got wind of them 1.5 years ago. I don't think Intel was ever going to release them and they keep getting worse and worse.
A scam alert should be issued. Buyer beware!
L3p3rM355i4h - Monday, February 21, 2005 - link
Ho Hum, intel is still stagnating. 227 watts load? Jeezus, thats incredible.mlittl3 - Monday, February 21, 2005 - link
Just a quick, possible correction.I don't know if you meant to or not, but the comparison of the Prescott vs. Prescott 2M table is missing Windows Media Creator HD and Visual Studio results.