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Product: Pentium 4 2.4GHz
Company: Intel
Website: http://www.intel.com
Estimated Street Price: $562
Review By: Julien Jay

Synthetic Benchmarks

Table Of Contents
1: Introduction
2: CPU Architecture
3: SSE2 Instructions & P4 2.4GHz CPU Design
4: Synthetic Benchmarks
5: Games Benchmarks
6: Applications Benchmarks
7: Benchmarks analysis
8: Conclusion

   We have chosen a Rambus platform to pass under the grill the Pentium 4 2.4 GHz. We ran many benchmarks to compare the Pentium 4 2.4 GHz with other Pentium 4 processors and its eternal AMD rival: the Athlon XP 2000+. To run our various tests we used the latest bios available from Intel & Epox with 256 MB of 800 MHz ECC Rambus and with a Hercules 3D Prophet II Ultra (based on the GeForce 2 Ultra GPU) graphic board. The hard disks used were a Maxtor UDMA 100 – 7200 RPM 30 GB and a IBM UDMA 100 - 7200RPM 40 GB. You can read the complete PC Setup below.

  • Complete PC setup for Pentium 4 2.4 GHz

Motherboard: Intel D850MD with latest P06 bios and i850 chipset
CPU: Pentium 4 1.7 GHz/2.0GHz/2.0A GHz/2.2GHz/2.4GHz
Memory: 256Mb of RDRAM (Rambus) running at 800MHz with ECC correction
Hard Disk: Maxtor 30GB UDMA 100 7200rpm
DVD: Goldstar
Display adapter: Hercules 3D Prophet II Ultra 64MB with latest 28.32 drivers
Peripherals: Yamaha CRW2100E CD Burner (16x/10x/40x), Microsoft TrackBall Optical, Microsoft Office Keyboard.
Everything was running under Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional SP2 with DirectX 8.1 installed and the Intel Chipset & Intel Application Accelerator Drivers.

  • Complete PC setup for Athlon XP 2000+

     Motherboard: Epox 8KHA+
    CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2000+
    Memory: 256MB of PC2100 DDR
    Hard Disk: IBM 40GB UDMA 100 7200rpm
    DVD: Pioneer 106
    Display adapter: Hercules 3D Prophet II Ultra 64MB with latest 28.32 drivers
     Peripherals: Microsoft TrackBall Optical, Microsoft Office Keyboard.
    Everything was running under Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional SP    2 with DirectX 8.1 installed and the     latest VIA 4in1 drivers.
Ziff Davis CPU Mark 99 is a rather old benchmarking tool that doesn't take advantage of the new instructions brought by the Pentium 4. Plus it doesn't rely much on the memory used by the system. The Athlon XP 2000+ is logically ahead with a small advance of 3% over the Pentium 4 2.4GHz. In this benchmark the Celeron 1.3GHz, the Pentium III 1.2GHz and the Pentium 4 1.7GHz get exactly the same results. The Pentium 4 2.4GHz, 200MHz faster than its predecessor gets a 8% better result.

CPU MathMark 3.0 trains the processor to perform some basic and complex mathematic operations (like 9^1500, calculating iterations of Pi, etc.) Once those tests are completed it reports the time it takes for the CPU to achieve such operations in seconds. Shortest is the bar in this graphic, faster is the CPU. Once again, the Athlon XP 2000+ beats Intel Pentium 4 processors thanks to its architecture optimized for basic mathematic operations. 4 2.2 GHz is the fastest processor. The Athlon XP 2000+ is twice faster than the Pentium III 1.2GHz to complete the arithmetic tests. According to our results, the Pentium 4 2.4GHz is 18% slower than the AMD Athlon XP 2000+. The Pentium 4 2.4GHz is 10% faster than its baby brother the Pentium 4 2.2GHz.

SiSoft Sandra 2002 is a synthetic benchmark that performs real basic test measuring Whetstone & Dhrystone values of a CPU. This benchmark program doesn't reflect at all the potential of a Pentium 4, but since it's a widely used performance measuring utility I can't skip it. The Pentium 4 2.4GHz gets a way better MFLOPS result than the Athlon XP 2000+ outperforming AMD's CPU by 28% while MIPS results are identical. In comparison to the Pentium 4 2.2GHz, the Pentium 4 2.4GHz is 10% faster.

You'll also notice that the Celeron 1.3 GHz outperforms the Pentium III 1.2GHz. Plus the Celeron 1.3 GHz is hard on the Pentium 4 1.7 GHz heels!

MFLOPS: The Whetstone benchmark is widely used in the computer industry as a measure of performance. Floating-point arithmetic is most significant in scientific, engineering, statistical and computer-aided design (CAD) programs. It is also a small component in spreadsheet, paint and drawing programs. Word processing programs typically do no floating-point computations at all. The Whetstone does a lot of floating-point arithmetic, some memory access, and a little integer arithmetic.

MIPS: The Dhrystone benchmark is widely used in the computer industry as a measure of performance. Dhrystone is a synthetic benchmark, designed to contain a representative sample of operations normally performed by applications. They don't calculate a result of any kind, but they do perform the sort of complicated sequences of instructions that real applications use. The Dhrystone result is determined by measuring the time it takes to perform these sequences of instructions. Simple integer arithmetic, logic decisions, and memory accesses are the dominant CPU activities in most Windows programs. The Dhrystone benchmark makes intensive use of these areas.

PCMark 2002 is MadOnion's brand new benchmark. PCMark2002 consists of a series of tests that represent common tasks in home and office programs. The Pentium 4 2.4GHz gets kudos since it gets the best results outperforming by 9% the Pentium 4 2.2Ghz. The Athlon XP 2000+ arrives third: AMD's CPU is outclassed by the Pentium 4 2.2GHz by 6% and by the Pentium 4 2.4GHz by 16%.

 
« SSE2 Instructions & P4 2.4GHz CPU Design Games Benchmarks »

 

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