ATI 9100 IGP PRO: Optimized for Prescott

Comparing Northwood and Prescott

One of the biggest surprises when testing began on the RS350 was ATI's strong recommendation that all benchmarking be done with a 2.8E Prescott. Since the 2.8E is readily available, and higher-speed Prescott's are just starting to appear in the marketplace, the 2.8 speed recommendation made sense. You can buy a 2.8E ,and it is the price level chip many might choose to use in an integrated video system.

However, in our comparisons of Prescott to Northwood and the 3.2EE, we had found the Prescott to lag behind the 3.2C and 3.2EE. You can see more information on the AnandTech comparisons at:

Intel 3.2E vs. 3.2EE vs. 3.2C: Comparing Baseline Performance
Intel's Pentium 4 E: Prescott Arrives with Luggage

Not only did we find Prescott slower than Northwood at 3.2GHz in our past comparisons, we also found that the performance difference increased as speed decreased. In other words, there should be a wider difference in the performance of a 2.8E and 2.8C than you find with 3.2GHz parts.

ATI was clear that the RS350 had been tweaked for best performance with the 2.8E Prescott. Since we did not have recent baseline benchmark tests with a 2.8C on an Intel chipset board, it was the perfect opportunity to test what ATI was saying. Can the 2.8E Prescott perform as well or better than the 2.8C on a chipset tweaked for Prescott performance? How does this compare with performance of the Northwood and Prescott on our standard Asus P4C800-E motherboard?