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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Alfaneo - Friday, August 26, 2005 - link
here is 478 pin result
Run All Summary
---------- SUM_RESULTS\3DSMAX\SUMMARY.TXT
3dsmax-03 Weighted Geometric Mean = 16.99
---------- SUM_RESULTS\CATIA\SUMMARY.TXT
catia-01 Weighted Geometric Mean = 14.27
---------- SUM_RESULTS\ENSIGHT\SUMMARY.TXT
ensight-01 Weighted Geometric Mean = 20.60
---------- SUM_RESULTS\LIGHT\SUMMARY.TXT
light-07 Weighted Geometric Mean = 12.34
---------- SUM_RESULTS\MAYA\SUMMARY.TXT
maya-01 Weighted Geometric Mean = 18.69
---------- SUM_RESULTS\PROE\SUMMARY.TXT
proe-03 Weighted Geometric Mean = 16.74
---------- SUM_RESULTS\SW\SUMMARY.TXT
sw-01 Weighted Geometric Mean = 14.16
---------- SUM_RESULTS\UGS\SUMMARY.TXT
ugs-04 Weighted Geometric Mean = 18.35
blckgrffn - Thursday, February 24, 2005 - link
Let's hope that they don't post it because they know that running 1T is imperative to get good performance number, and thus use it by default.Hans Maulwurf - Wednesday, February 23, 2005 - link
Many other sites don´t publish their command rate either, this looks very strange for me. Most sites used to publish them before. I don´t understand...L3p3rM355i4h - Wednesday, February 23, 2005 - link
I'm assuming 1T, although the ammount of pwnage that would occur if it was 2T would be incredible.Zebo - Wednesday, February 23, 2005 - link
Derek/Anand- Why is it you don't say what A64's command rate was? 1T or 2T? This makes a huge impact on A64's performance (as shown by Anand right here and myself in forums) and is sloppy jounalism to leave out. Sure "other" sites do this crap but not anandtech.:|Dualboy24 - Wednesday, February 23, 2005 - link
I am just not finding the releases to be impressive lately... I am waiting to see the future dual core etc... perhaps that will wow us all. Its just not like the 90s anymore where it was always an exciting time with CPUs.Perhaps a battle between 56kbps modem models would prove entertaining :) L()L
neogodless - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
#64 I'm saying I don't bother. I don't do that at work (P42.4C) either. At work, I listen to MP3s while having 2 e-mail clients open, various browser windows and tabs, a development environment, FTP, database manager, various IM programs, remote desktop, etc. And I do about the same at home, though usually on a smaller scale. And it works fine. However, if I go to a web page that gobbles up resources (poorly written javascript, i can give you an example page), I'm able to do everything else on the HT machine which shows about "53%" overall CPU usage. An the Athlon 64, if something gobbles up CPU, I see "99%" usage and a sluggish environment. But it's ALL subjective... I want to see Objective measurements.I also don't want to see Athlon vs. Intel opinions/flames because I'm not claiming one or the other is better... just asking for objective measurements.
RZaakir - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
neo, are you saying that you have problems running a game and listening to MP3s simultaneously on your Athlon 64?RockHydra11 - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Disappointing to say the least....neogodless - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
I'm not sure why I got attacked for requesting Multi-tasking benchmarks. I prefer my AMD for gaming, and I prefer the Intel at work where I run lots of programs at once but (unfortunately) never game. It's not a fair comparison anyway because my home machine is limited by only one monitor, while my work machine has two.Yes, many benchmarks are optimized for Hyperthreading, and if they are synthetic, then it doesn't matter. I'm asking for benchmarks with programs you use every day. If they're optimized for Hyperthreading, then you will see real world benefit from that, when using an HT enabled processor.
When I run games on my AMD64, it gobbles up all the CPU (even if it's an old game) for whatever reason, and I don't find it practical to leave a game running in the background while doing something else. I've done it, and it didn't greatly hinder doing some small task like check e-mail or send an instant message, but I wouldn't intentionally do it, especially if I decided I'd rather listen to Mp3s than finish my game...