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Product: Pentium 4 2.8GHz & Intel D845EBT 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 2.8GHz CPU Design
4: Intel i82845e Chipset
5: Intel D845EBT Motherboard
6: Intel D845EBT Sound 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 30.82 drivers. The big surprise is that each Intel Pentium 4 processors starting from 2.0GHz beats AMD's Athlon XP 2200+ 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 2.8GHz is 8% better than the one obtained with the AMD Athlon XP 2200+. The Pentium 4 2.8GHz beats the Pentium 4 2.66GHz by less than 1% showing that at a certain point the CPU frequency increase won't help increasing game performance unless the graphic cards is changed. Finally the Pentium 4 2.8GHz is 5% faster than the Pentium 4 2.0a GHz.

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 2.8GHz gives a result 1.5% better than the Pentium 4 2.66GHz. This demonstrates as with the Quake III benchmark that at some point the CPU frequency doen't help significantly anymore to increase framerate with a -limited- GPU, in this a GeForce II Ultra.  The Pentium 4 2.8GHz is 12% faster than the Athlon XP 2200+. The Athlon XP 2200+ slightly beats the Pentium 4 2.2GHz 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 2200+ is on top of the race outperforming the Pentium 4 2.8GHz by 4%. The Pentium 4 2.8GHz is 4% faster than the Pentium 2.66GHz. In this test, the Pentium 4 2.8GHz is 36% faster than the Pentium 4 2.0a GHz!
 
« Synthetic Benchmarks Applications Benchmarks »

 

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