Intel's Pentium 4 670: Just Another Speed Bump
by Derek Wilson on May 26, 2005 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
The Test and Business/General Use Performance
The Test
Our hardware configurations are similar to what we've used in previous comparisons.AMD Athlon 64 Configuration
Socket-939 Athlon 64 CPUs
2 x 512MB OCZ PC3200 EL Dual Channel DIMMs 2-2-2-10
NVIDIA nForce4 Reference Motherboard
ATI Radeon X800 XT PCI Express
Intel Pentium 4 Configuration
LGA-775 Intel Pentium 4 and Extreme Edition CPUs
2 x 512MB Crucial DDR-II 533 Dual Channel DIMMs 3-3-3-12
Intel 925XE and 945G Motherboards
ATI Radeon X800 XT PCI Express
Business/General Use Performance
Business Winstone 2004Business Winstone 2004 tests the following applications in various usage scenarios:
. Microsoft Access 2002
. Microsoft Excel 2002
. Microsoft FrontPage 2002
. Microsoft Outlook 2002
. Microsoft PowerPoint 2002
. Microsoft Project 2002
. Microsoft Word 2002
. Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition 2003
. WinZip 8.1
Office Productivity SYSMark 2004
SYSMark's Office Productivity suite consists of three tests, the first of which is the Communication test. The Communication test consists of the following:"The user receives an email in Outlook 2002 that contains a collection of documents in a zip file. The user reviews his email and updates his calendar while VirusScan 7.0 scans the system. The corporate web site is viewed in Internet Explorer 6.0. Finally, Internet Explorer is used to look at samples of the web pages and documents created during the scenario."
The next test is Document Creation performance, which shows very little difference in drive performance between the contenders:
"The user edits the document using Word 2002. He transcribes an audio file into a document using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 6. Once the document has all the necessary pieces in place, the user changes it into a portable format for easy and secure distribution using Acrobat 5.0.5. The user creates a marketing presentation in PowerPoint 2002 and adds elements to a slide show template."
The final test in our Office Productivity suite is Data Analysis, which BAPCo describes as:
"The user opens a database using Access 2002 and runs some queries. A collection of documents are archived using WinZip 8.1. The queries' results are imported into a spreadsheet using Excel 2002 and are used to generate graphical charts."
Microsoft Office XP SP-2
Here, we see in that the purest of office application tests, performance doesn't vary all too much.
Mozilla 1.4
Quite possibly the most frequently used application on any desktop is the one that we pay the least amount of attention to when it comes to performance. While a bit older than the core that is now used in Firefox, performance in Mozilla is worth looking at as many users are switching from IE to a much more capable browser on the PC - Firefox.
ACD Systems ACDSee PowerPack 5.0
ACDSee is a popular image editing tool that is great for basic image editing options such as batch resizing, rotating, cropping and other such features that are too elementary to justify purchasing something as powerful as Photoshop. There are no extremely complex filters here, just pure batch image processing.
Ahead Software Nero Express 6.0.0.3
While it was a major issue in the past, buffer underrun errors while burning a CD or DVD are few and far between these days, thanks to high performance CPUs as well as vastly improved optical drives. When you take the optical drive out of the equation, how do these CPU's stack up with burning performance?
Winzip
Archiving performance ends up being fairly CPU bound as well as I/O limited.
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bob661 - Friday, May 27, 2005 - link
Since you're here Jarred. Was the tested 4000 a San Diego core? Thanks much.bob661 - Friday, May 27, 2005 - link
#16There ARE San Diego core 4000's. Check here:
http://tinyurl.com/cdy8m
JarredWalton - Friday, May 27, 2005 - link
Certain benchmarks are not 100% repeatable. WinStones, SysMark, WorldBench, etc. can all vary by a decent amount. While running multiple benches does help a bit, you can still end up with some odd results. I've seen variance of 5% on some benchmarks, for example. I don't know about the WinZip and Nero results, though - it looks like some other hardware or driver provided for a major change.flatblastard - Thursday, May 26, 2005 - link
#10 "don't forget, a 200 MHz increase with AMD cpus is like a 300+ MHz increase for intel"#13 Also consider the fact that 200 "A64 Mhz" aren't equal to 200 "P4 MHz"
I am aware of this, and I will now make you aware of the fact that I can afford to have 10 less FPS.
Tujan - Thursday, May 26, 2005 - link
""Or does an endorsement by the Blue Man Group wash away all sins? :) ""............Nay think its a matter of reviewers not being aware of when the next shipment of bananas is going to come in.
A load of bull can be a load of bull sometimes.
Tujan - Thursday, May 26, 2005 - link
Is lower or higher 'better for the Sysmark Data Analysis scores ? The 670 got 183"". [ ]Weird how the AMD Athlon 3400+(2.4/512/1ch) did so badly in the Specviewperf 8- Pro/Engineer Performance Engineering and SolidWorks Viewset....
I was trying to tell how well a given processor would do,so bliping on the AMD Athlon 3400+(2.4/512/1ch) I thought that would be a good processor to have,now is that a 754 platform processor/motherboard.
Couldn't find same range processor from a retailer in 939 wich would only show it in 754?
[ ]
Somebody here said 1ch/2ch is dual channel ? The benchmark setup did tell of using the 754,lest an Nvidia SLI is one of those ?
SLIM - Thursday, May 26, 2005 - link
Heres another request for some kind of explanation about the very odd scaling amongst the 6xx series chips especially in the PC Worldbench results.mjz - Thursday, May 26, 2005 - link
14 - the 4000 is an FX 53 without the multi.. it is not a san diego core.bob661 - Thursday, May 26, 2005 - link
Also, could you guys include an Autodesk Inventor or Mechanical Desktop bench?bob661 - Thursday, May 26, 2005 - link
Does anyone know if the 4000 used was a San Diego core? Thanks.