Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz: One step closer

IT/Constant Computing Performance

Still a newcomer to the AnandTech test suite, CSA Research’s Officebench 2001 provides us with a great way to not only test office application performance, but it also gives us the ability to bring even the most powerful systems to their knees using the tool’s built in stress modules.

These stress modules allow you to simulate connections to Exchange servers, Access databases as well as streaming video.  We tested in three configurations: a baseline setup with no stress modules just a straight office application tests, a medium load (loading level 1) and a heavy stress load (loading level 2).

Only a few percent of the benchmark execution time is spent waiting for the disk to provide the CPU with data, meaning that with enough memory and a large enough cache Office Bench should perform perfectly fine and it definitely does.

While there is a 20% performance range between the Pentium 4 1.3GHz and the highest performing setup in the chart, everything above the Athlon MP 1.2GHz ends up performing within that critical 10% range 

Again we notice that there is no real performance difference between the Athlon and the Athlon MP.

As soon as things get a bit more stressful the Athlon 1.4 and the Pentium 4 1.8 switch places.  The completion times get slower but not by too much, let’s crank things up once more…

Turning up the loading level once more the Pentium 4 1.8 drops down another place now taking a backseat to the Athlon MP.  At the same time, the Athlon MP starts to distance itself from the regular Athlon.  As the amount of data being dealt with increases, the Athlon MP’s data prefetch and TLB enhancements give it a bit of headroom over the older Thunderbird based Athlon.  The added performance isn’t enough to top the Athlon 1.4 however, nor is it enough to challenge the overclocked 2GHz P4.