The Active Network
ActiveWin: Reviews Active Network | New Reviews | Old Reviews | Interviews |Mailing List | Forums 
 

Amazon.com

  *  


Product: Pentium 4 2.53GHz & Intel D850EMV2 Motherboard
Company: Intel
Website: http://www.intel.com
Estimated Street Price:
$637
Review By: Julien Jay

Games Benchmarks

Table Of Contents
1: Introduction
2: CPU Architecture
3: SSE2 Instructions & P4 2.53GHz CPU Design
4: Intel i82850e Chipset
5: Intel D850EMV2 Motherboard
6: Intel D850EMV2 Advanced Features
7: Synthetic Benchmarks
8: Games Benchmarks
9: Applications Benchmarks
10: Benchmarks analysis
11:
Conclusion

  

How can we do a complete roundup of the most powerful processors without testing them under Quake III Arena, the ultimate gamers' reference? The Pentium 4 has always exceled under Quake III Arena so it's no surprise to see the results. 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 2.0GHz 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 2.53GHz is 12% better than the one obtained with the AMD Athlon XP 2000+. The Pentium 4 2.53GHz gives a framerate 1% better than the Pentium 4 2.4GHz FSB400MHz 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 we consider it to be a reference graphics card.

This benchmark is the first to show that a Pentium 2.4GHz (FSB533) teamed up with PC1066 memory can beat a faster processor, a Pentium 4 2.53GHz teamed up with PC800 memory. For example the Pentium 4 2.4GHz - PC1066 gives a 0.7% better result than the Pentium 4 2.53GHz - PC800.

MadOnion's 3D Mark 2001 has become an other reference when benchmarking 3D performance of PCs. We used it with our faithful Hercules 3D Prophet II Ultra 64MB. The Pentium 4 2.53GHz gives a result 7.4% better than the one of the Pentium 4 2.4Ghz FSB400 and outperforms the Athlon XP 2000+ by 13%. The Pentium 4 2.53Ghz with PC1066 memory gives a result 3% better than the one of the Pentium 4 2.53GHz using PC800 memory.

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. The results are all very near, but nonetheless the Pentium 4 2.53GHz/i850e/PC1066 couple arrives on top with 75.03fps.

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 2.53GHz PC1066 by 10%! The test highlights a modest performance gain of 2% when switching from PC800 to PC1066 memory.
 
« Synthetic Benchmarks Applications Benchmarks »

 

  *  
  *   *