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

Sysmark2001 :

Much like Content Creation 2002, Sysmark offers results based on actual office productivity and Internet content creation scenarios. The benchmark is script based and uses a variety of applications such as Office2000, Dreamweaver 4, Photoshop 6 and Flash 5 in a realistic, multi-tasking environment to simulate real world usage.

Again we see the Pentium 4's striking ability to cut through some of the most used applications on the market today. As I mentioned in an earlier review it's been said that Sysmark is biased towards Intel processors but purely based on the way this benchmark works, simulating a "day in the life" of a Web content creator and office user it would be hard to see how that could be the case.

 

Video2000 :

MadOnion.com's Video2000 is a great way of determining video performance on a variety of graphics chips testing DVD playback, video editing and MPEG encoding but as we're not looking at graphics cards I'll only be looking at the MPEG encoding portion of the results.

This results goes in favor of the Athlon but I think we need to remember that Video2000 is now a relatively old software suite written around DirectX 7. I did a variety of tests using FlasK MPEG 6.0 coupled with the latest DivX 4.12 codecs and in almost every case the Northwood blitzed the AthlonXP. The reason I'm not publishing those results is due to the fact that I lack the technical know-how to be certain my results are accurate, particularly with the number of optimised and tweaked versions that were available on various sites. Although 6.0 is optimised for SSE2 in addition to MMX and 3DNow, I have no plans of putting my foot in my mouth in the way a certain other site did by either using wrong settings or wrong executables so you'll just have to take my word for the fact that I ran the standard version using the latest codecs I could find and the Northwood stormed through the tests. Maybe when I get a bit more savvy with the various configurations I'll feel confident enough to post some results but at the moment I'm still climbing that particular learning curve.

 

 

 

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