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

Games 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

  

How can we do a complete roundup of the most powerful processors without testing them under Quake III Arena, the ultimate gamers' reference? This test demonstrates how powerful a Pentium 4 processor is, over AMD Athlon XP and Intel Pentium III or Celeron as well as how important is the performance of the memory attached to the CPU. The various systems tested were all using an Hercules 3D Prophet II Ultra 64 MB graphics card with the latest NVIDIA 28.32 drivers. The big surprise is that each Intel Pentium 4 processors starting from 1.7GHz beats AMD's Athlon XP 2000+ showing the unbelievable power resource the Pentium 4 has in stock for advanced 3D games. The rambus memory is also decisive for the outstanding Pentium 4 Quake III framerate. The framerate gets with a Pentium 4 2.4GHz is 10% better than the one obtained with the AMD Athlon XP 2000+. The Pentium 4 2.4GHz gives a framerate 1% better than the Pentium 4 2.2GHz showing that at a certain point the frequencies itself isn't enough to further enhance performance: we deliberately use a GeForce II Ultra graphics card for our benchmarks since its a reference graphics card.

With Quake III Arena, the Celeron 1.3 GHz beats the Pentium III 1.2GHz by 13%. The Athlon XP 2000+ is 48% faster than the Celeron 1.3GHz.

MadOnion's 3D Mark 2001 has become an other reference when benchmarking PCs. We used it with our faithful Hercules 3D Prophet II Ultra 64MB. The Pentium 4 2.4GHz gives a result 6% better than the one of the Pentium 4 2.2Ghz and outperforms the Athlon XP 2000+ in almost the same proportions. The addition of 512KB of cache memory boosts the performance of the Pentium 4 2.0AGHz by 6% over the Pentium 4 2.0GHz.

To complete our series of multimedia benchmarks, we tested the latest Pentium 4 with the famous Unreal Tournament game. As usual we used a GeForce II Ultra 64MB along with NVIDIA's 28.32 drivers. The test was done in a 640*480*16bits resolution. We used 'utbench.dem' to test our CPUs. As you can see, the Pentium 4 2.4GHz/i850 arrives on top with 76.49fps showing a 3% advance over the Pentium 4 2.2GHz and the Ahtlon XP 2000+. The Pentium 4 2.2GHz has a small advance over the Athlon XP 2000+. The Pentium 4 2.0AGHz/i850 outperforms the Pentium 4 2.0GHz by 5%.

To conclude this extensive benchmark here are the results we get from AMD NBench 2.0. NBench is a program, made by AMD, that measures the ability of a CPU to render complex 3D scenes. It's obviously not optimized for the Pentium 4, and massively biased toward the Athlon. Nonetheless I thought this was interesting to publish those results. As you can see the Athlon XP 2000+ is on top of the race outperforming the Pentium 4 2.4GHz/i850 by 17%! The Pentium 4 2.4Ghz/i850 is 45% faster than the Pentium 4 1.7GHz on the same i850 platform. We see a 10% performance increase for the Pentium 4 2.0a GHz against the Pentium 4 2.0GHz once again demonstrating the importance of the level 2 cache memory.
 
« Synthetic Benchmarks Applications Benchmarks »

 

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