Intel's Pentium 4 570J - Will 3.8GHz do the trick?

AMD Athlon 64 4000+ and Intel Pentium 4 570J: Head to Head

We've got our entire suite of benchmarks with all of the various processor speeds in the coming pages, but we thought we'd start this review out with the comparison that made the most sense: the Pentium 4 570J vs. the AMD Athlon 64 4000+.  Both chips are at virtually identical price points (the 4000+ sells for around $680, which is where we expect the 570J to be) and are the flagship desktop CPUs from both companies (not including the Extreme Edition and FX series). 

The comparison uses all of our normal tests, but simply singles out these two processors as the only contenders.  If you are interested in seeing a broad picture of AMD vs. Intel, the forthcoming pages will be able to give you just that.  This page is mostly for those readers who have kept up with the recent CPU reviews at AnandTech and just want an update on how the 570J changes things, so here we go:

Intel is unusually competitive in the Business/General Usage tests which is absolutely not the norm. Despite Intel's strengths, a couple of the tests greatly favored AMD (Mozilla and WinRAR), giving AMD the advantage here.

The performance breakdown is somewhat close under the Multitasking Content Creation tests, with AMD even walking away with a win in the mutltiasking encoder test, but AMD's advantages of victory are not as frequent nor as large as Intel's.

We've been impressed at how close things have been thus far and our Video Creation/Photo Editing tests make things even closer, with both camps trading wins resulting in a virtual tie. It looks like Photoshop performance is identical between the two chips and while AMD is faster under Premier, Intel is faster under Movie Creator by about the same percentage.

The encoding tests clearly go to Intel, AMD isn't able to muster up a single win here although they are close with the audio encoding Jukebox test. The performance advantages held by Intel are very strong in the DivX, XviD and WME9 tests.

While Intel took all of the encoding tests, AMD still can't be beat when it comes to gaming performance. It is going to take a lot more than 3.8GHz to tilt the balance in Intel's favor here. Given what we've seen with the performance of the Extreme Edition chips under our gaming tests, we'd hypothesize that even Intel's 600 series of Pentium 4s won't be able to dethrone AMD as the gaming performance leader.

Both AMD and Intel trade wins in the 3D rendering tests, however AMD's two wins are in the same test (just different APIs) and the margin of victory is much lower than Intel's victory in the SPECapc 3dsmax 6 test, so when it comes to 3dsmax rendering performance the nod goes to the 570J.

Unusually close, our SPECviewperf tests show a very heated battle between the two chips, but AMD manages to secure two major victories that give them the performance crown here. AMD's performance under our Visual Studio 6 compile test makes it clear that developers working on large projects need to be using the Athlon 64 to keep compile times as low as possible; with almost a 20% performance advantage in compile time, the Athlon 64 will make a huge difference in how long it takes to compile large projects.

While we expected this review to be more of the usual, we were pleasantly surprised to see that the Pentium 4 570J is actually a fairly strong competitor to AMD's Athlon 64 4000+. Part of the reason behind this is because AMD didn't actually increase the clock speed of the 4000+, it still runs at the same 2.4GHz as the 3800+, albeit with a larger L2 cache. Had AMD released a 2.6GHz Athlon 64 4000+ Intel would have had a more difficult time with the 570J, but given that things are the way they are our CPU recommendation is split between the two.

Gamers, business users, developers and the general public will find that the Athlon 64 4000+ is faster in the types of applications they run. However content producers or anyone that does a good deal of video encoding or 3D rendering will find that the Pentium 4 570J will offer better performance for their applications. AMD still does better overall, but Intel does a very good job of hanging onto the performance crown in a handful of specific areas.

Remember that the recommendations change as soon as you start looking at lower price points, but at this $600 - $700 the recommendations above are quite valid.

For those of you looking for comparisons at the $200 and $500 price points we've already done these investigations in previous articles so be sure to check them out as well. For those of you who haven't been following our CPU coverage lately we've included our normal performance graphs comparing the Pentium 4 570J to the rest of the current CPU market over the coming pages.