Test conditions

System Setup

Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz
Intel Pentium 4 3.6GHz @3.2GHz LGA-775
Intel Pentium 4 3.6GHz LGA-775
Intel Pentium 4 3.4GHz Extreme Edition LGA-775

ASUS P4P800 Deluxe w/Turbo Mode & MAM Enabled (865PE)
ASUS P45AD2 Premium Edition (925X)

1GB Micron DDR2 SDRAM
1GB Corsair XMS3200 DDR SDRAM

ATI RADEON X800 XT
ATI RADEON X600 XT
Driver version ATI 6.14.10.6451 Beta

ATI RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition @ 500/500
ATI RADEON 9600 XT
Driver version CATALYST 4.6

250GB Maxtor Hard Drive Maxline III SATA Hard Drive w/16MB Cache

Windows XP Professional SP1

DirectX 9.0b

Benchmarks

Lock On: Modern Air Combat (Mig-29 custom demo)
Call of Duty (demo0032 custom demo)
Quake III: Arena version 1.32 (fscrusher demo)
Unreal Tournament 2004 (T3 custom demo)
IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles (The Black Death track)
Splinter Cell (FS custom demo)
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness (Beyond3D custom demo)
Halo: Combat Evolved (stock benchmark)

Notes

Since the AGP slot on our P4C800 Deluxe board recently died, we decided to substitute ASUS’ excellent P4P800 Deluxe instead. When properly configured, the P4P800 Deluxe can run just as fast as the fastest 875P board, so we feel confident that we’ve got a powerful system setup to represent Intel’s previous platform.

Representing 925X, we selected ASUS’ P5AD2 Premium Edition motherboard. This motherboard gives a new meaning to the term “loaded”, with integrated Intel Hi-Def 7.1 audio, Dual Gigabit LAN, 802.11g onboard (with wireless AP mode support), triple RAID support (4 SATA with RAID 0, 1, 10 and software RAID 5/4 SATA with RAID 0, 1, and 4 IDE RAID with RAID 0, 1, and 0+1) IEEE-1394b, and an SATA external header. Once again we dialed down the memory timings and enabled the ASUS board’s “Turbo” mode for maximum performance.

Basically, both of these systems are as tuned as they’re going to get. We’ve split the article into two sections. The first deals with CPU scaling, with clock speeds ranging from 3.2GHz to 3.6GHz on the Pentium 4, while a LGA-775 Pentium 4 3.4GHz Extreme Edition was also thrown in for good measure. The second-half of our benchmarks are head-to-head comparisons between the corresponding AGP and PCI Express ATI parts.