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

Quake 3 Arena :

In addition to being one of the most popular benchmarks around, Quake 3 not only gives a realistic insight into OpenGL performance, it also unleashes the benefits of SIMD as found in the MMX and 3DNow! instruction sets and it utilises SSE optimisations which are now to be found on both processors tested.

In the past we have made the assumption the the P4 took the lead in this benchmark purely based on its SSE ability but we must now conclude that the Pentium 4 is simply more efficient at handling SSE than the Athlon is. This isn't an insignificant win for the Northwood with an inspirational 11FPS victory at 800x600 with the highest quality settings. 800x600 may seem a touch low by today's standards but those of you running TV Out will probably be using this resolution.

 

3Dmark 2001 :

For the time being I've decided to stick to the original flavor of 3DMark 2001 until more people have upgraded, not that the results are wildly different. Here we see a demonstration, albeit a synthetic demonstration of the XPs gaming prowess. I need to balance that statement though by saying that this doesn't quite tell to whole story, in fact there's a real analogy here between the Northwoods and the original Radeon from ATi in that although the peak framerates aren't as high in the benchmarks, there is a feeling that framerates remain far more constant. What the Northwood lacks in peak power it seems to make up for in stamina, powering through the heavy scenes with much less of a hit than the results might indicate.

 

SPECviewperf 6.1.2 :

SPECviewperf is designed to test OpenGL rendering performance across multiple platforms. Additions to 6.1.2 include multiple materials, user clip-planes and increased default window size. Again the chart scale is a little exaggerated but this one goes to the XP by the narrowest of margins. It really is good at last to see the Pentium 4 unleashing some of its potential. For the true performance chaser, coupling the Northwood with RDRAM should really light a few fires, though not literally of course!

 

 

<<< Back to Review Index | Next Page, Performance >>>

Home

1 :: 2 :: 3 :: 4 :: 5 :: 6 :: 7 :: 8