Intel Pentium 4 2.2A (Northwood)

Author : Wayne Date : 4th March 2002

...Product	Pentium4 2.2A
...Manufacturer	Intel
...Supplier	Intel
...Price	£557.00 approx @ Scan

 

 

 

Performance :

Test system 1 :

Intel Pentium 4 Northwood 2.2GHz
Shuttle AK40R VIA P4X255 (DDR) Motherboards
256MB Kingmax PC2100 DDR Memory
Creative Labs GeForce 3 Ti500
Fujitsu 40GB ATA-100 HDD

Test system 2 :

AMD Athlon XP2000+
Epox 8KHA+ VIA KT266A (DDR) Motherboards
256MB Kingmax PC2100 DDR Memory
Creative Labs GeForce 3 Ti500
Fujitsu 40GB ATA-100 HDD

Content Creation 2002 :

Using some of the most popular apps like Adobe Photoshop 6.0.1 , Adobe Premiere 6.0 , Macromedia Director 8.5 , Macromedia Dreamweaver UltraDev 4 , Microsoft Windows Media, Encoder 7.01.00.3055 , Netscape Navigator 6/6.01 and Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 5.0c (build 184), ZD's Content Creation 2002 stresses performance under real life 32 bit operating conditions, even multitasking with often several apps open at once. This is as close as you can come to realtime productivity testing as you can get.

I was expecting this to be a much closer battle than it turned out to be. The additional cache clearly played its part in this impressive score and it appears that Intel's boasts about the new P4 bringing new levels of performance to your desktop applications really does have a lot of merit.

 

POV-Ray :

This one surprised me almost as much as the Content Creation Results. POV-Ray is not optimised for either CPU so I can only guess that it's an integer weakness that causes the P4 to fall so far behind the XP. In actual fact the scale of the graph is a little misleading but the difference in performance is still a full 8%. I've no doubt that with a heapin' helpin' of SSE optimised code we'd see the Northwood close the gap or even maybe pull ahead, but I'm nonetheless a little puzzled at this poor showing.

 

 

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