Benchmarks Analysis

   Logically the Pentium 4 2.53 GHz is the most powerful processor that surpasses every other platform, including AMD’s Athlon XP. It’s a fact the Pentium 4 2.53 GHz blows away every other CPU. However you’ll note that the AMD Athlon XP 2000+, running in fact at 1666 MHz gets an honorable score when facing a processor that is so much faster. More interesting is the fact that results from games like Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament seem to reach their ceiling: at a certain moment the brut frequency of the CPU doesn’t help to significantly enhance the results anymore since the code of these programs is old and not optimised for the Pentium 4. Some benchmarks like CPUMathMark 3 and SiSoft 2002 highlight the fact they don’t take in account the quality of the memory attached to the processor. 

If you’ve carefully looked at the results given by Ziff Davis benchmarks you have obviously seen the Pentium 4 2.2 GHz is shortly ahead in comparison of the Pentium 4 2.0A GHz and that we have dropped the 3D WinBench 2000 benchmark. This is due to the fact there’s a major bug in the code of Ziff Davis benchmarks that appears only with 2.2GHz and faster CPUs: ZD’s poorly written code clogged up the Pentium 4 pipeline resulting in random errors and abnormally low results. Ziff Davis has confirmed this to be a bug in their software, but so far no patch is available. 

All those tests have shown the Rambus 1066 memory helps in delivering better results making it the ideal companion for Pentium 4 FSB533 processors. However for the same processor the performance gain brought by the Rambus 1066 over the Rambus 800 never exceeds 5% which is a bit disapointing. The moderated performance enhancement the Rambus 1066 delivers isn't justified by its prohibitive cost. The new Rambus 1066 teamed up with a 533MHz FSB gives applications a comfortable memory bandwidth increased by 19% which is quite appreciable despite it's actually a bit under exploited as our results have demonstrated.

If most actual benchmarking tools now take into play the specific Pentium 4 intrinsic characteristics, they’re not focused enough on what the Pentium 4 does the best: multimedia. Indeed while the Pentium III platform is an all-terrain one the Pentium 4 has been designed for high demanding multimedia applications and 3D games. The Pentium 4 is the ultimate solution to enjoy high speed times when using high-end multimedia applications that code into MPEG 2, rip into WMA or MP3, mount videos, add special effects to videos, etc.