Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz Review November 14, 2002 Brandon Bell

Introduction

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Intel kicked off 2002 with the introduction of the 2GHz Pentium 4, therefore it’s only fitting that they’ve ended the year with another bang in the form of the 3.06GHz Pentium 4. And say what you will about the hyper-pipelined Netburst architecture’s efficiency per clock cycle, it can’t be said that its implementation hasn’t allowed the chip manufacturer to achieve incredible clock speeds. While previous processor releases moved in steps of 66MHz, with Pentium 4 Intel has been moving in leaps of up to 200MHz!

And if our experience overclocking the 3.06GHz Pentium 4 is any indication, Intel has plenty of headroom to kick up the clock frequencies well into 2003. Not only will clock frequencies be cranked up, Intel will also introduce a faster 667MHz bus for the Pentium 4. By moving from 400MHz to 533MHz the Pentium 4 gained roughly in 5% in performance at 2.4GHz. With any luck we should see similar gains when 667MHz chips debut next year.


But that’s not the only innovation coming from Intel. From today’s 3.06GHz Pentium 4 processor and on, all of Intel’s Pentium 4 chips will support the company’s Hyper-Threading technology.

With Hyper-Threading, multiple threads of a software application can be run simultaneously on one processor. Previously, multiple CPUs would have been required to perform this task. Hyper-Threaded processors essentially trick the OS into thinking that two physical processors are present. This is accomplished by using CPU resources that are otherwise left sitting idle. For example, when memory accesses are taking place, or when a branch instruction is miss-predicted. Intel has also added new registers and other circuitry within the processor as well.

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Hyper-Threading Impressions

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Hyper-Threading Requirements

As far as we know, Intel has no plans to add Hyper-Threading technology to its older stable of processors. But Intel has been known to heed the demands of its OEM customers. Just as the market wanted Pentium 4 variants in 100MHz increments and Northwood processors at clock speeds below 2GHz (contrary to Intel’s initial plans), it’s possible that Intel’s current plans may change. When you consider the slump that the PC market is currently in, we wouldn’t be surprised if a buzzword like “Hyper-Threading” is just too tempting for Intel and its partners to pass up. After all, everyone still remembers the MMX craze. Motherboard manufacturers in particular would love to get the early Pentium 4 adopters to move on up to a motherboard that supports the world of Hyper-Threading. Inexpensive processors that support Hyper-Threading can make this happen.

For now though the official company line is that you’ll need a processor at 3.06GHz or higher.


Besides the proper processor, your motherboard will have to be based on a chipset that supports Hyper-Threading technology. Fortunately, all existing 533MHz chipsets from Intel (with the exclusion of 845G chipsets that utilize Intel’s A-stepping) support Hyper-Threading. 845PE in particular supports this technology right out of the box. If your motherboard is based on the 845E or 850E chipset, you’ll need to download the latest BIOS for your motherboard in order to obtain the technology.

As far as third-party chipsets are concerned, the VIA P4X400 also supports Hyper-Threading, although some of the earlier motherboards that hit the market may require a BIOS update. VIA’s P4PB Ultra we reviewed last week supported Hyper-Threading out of the box. In contrast, none of the SiS 648 motherboards we’ve tested supported the technology and SiS has been mum on words to date. We’ve heard rumors that a new stepping of the chipset will be required, if that’s true current owners of SiS 648 motherboards are out of luck.

The final piece of the Hyper-Threading equation is operating system support. As of right now, operating systems based on Linux kernel 2.4.18 (or higher), Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional are the only ones supported. Since it supports multi-threaded applications, Windows 2000 will show some performance benefits, but for optimal performance the OS must support the technology natively.

Hyper-Threading Performance

First off, as it stands now Hyper-Threading will not increase your frame rate in games. At least it won’t when the only application you’re running is a game. In all of our tests the performance difference was barely over a percentage point, in most cases it was less than that. However, if you’re the type that may wish to encode a video or an MP3, while you’re playing your favorite game, Hyper-Threading can offer a substantial performance benefit. Using Main Concept’s MPEG encoder we converted a 19MB AVI into DiVX format in 54.7 seconds while Quake 3 benchmarks were running. With Hyper-Threading disabled, the same task took 106.4 seconds.

Even without Quake 3 running simultaneously this conversion was completed more quickly with Hyper-Threading enabled -- 46.5 seconds with Hyper-Threading versus 52.5 without Hyper-Threading. Of course, most of you probably won’t be encoding files while gaming but we could see this coming in handy for the audio/video enthusiast who would like to work on his family reunion video while getting a little bit of work done in Adobe Photoshop.

In another test, we ran SETI@home in the background while testing with Unreal Tournament 2003. In this environment, we actually found that the system ran over 30% slower when Hyper-Threading was enabled.

Finally, we conducted tests with Business Winstone 2002, to see if it would see some benefit from Hyper-Threading technology. But again the performance difference was negligible, 33.4 WinMarks with Hyper-Threading enabled versus 33.2 with the feature turned off.





SIDEBAR: We overclocked our 3.06GHz Pentium 4 to 3.56GHz at 1.75V.

Test Systems

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System Setup

AMD Athlon XP 2700+
AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (266MHz FSB)
Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz
Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz
Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz

ASUS A7N8X Deluxe
ASUS P4PE

512MB Corsair XMS3200 DDR333 SDRAM

ATI RADEON 9700 PRO
Driver version 6.13.10.6193

30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA/100 Hard Drive

Windows XP Professional

DirectX 8.1

Benchmarks

3D Mark 2001 Second Edition Build 330 – 32-bit color
Quake III: Arena version 1.17
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter
Unreal Tournament 2003
Business Winstone 2002 ver 1.0.1



SIDEBAR: We used the retail ASUS A7N8X motherboard for testing. We received it just in time for this review.

3D Mark 2001

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3DMark 2001 - DirectX 8

Notes

The Athlon XP 2700+ and Pentium 4 2.8GHz finish neck and neck in 3DMark 2001SE, but the Pentium 4 3.06GHz holds a 3% performance advantage over the second fastest processor at 800x600x32. With Hyper-Threading disabled, we witnessed a drop in performance of just under 1%, not even enough to make it worth mentioning.


SIDEBAR: According to Intel’s research, nearly 50% of consumers who own a PC that is three years or older don’t trust their computers to handle more than one application at a time.

Serious Sam 2

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Serious Sam 2 - OpenGL

Notes

The Serious Sam engine has always favored the Athlon platform, and even with its clock speed advantage the 3GHz Pentium 4 isn’t able to outpace the Athlon XP 2700+/nForce2 combination. It finishes two percentage points behind the processor at 800x600, while the additional clock speed nets the 3GHz Pentium 4 an additional 5% over its predecessor at 2.8GHz.



SIDEBAR: We’ll be taking a look at all the available Pentium 4 chipsets shortly. It should be an interesting article!

Quake III

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Quake III - High Quality

Notes

The Pentium 4 platform continues to hold the crown in Quake 3, at 800x600 the 3GHz processor outperforms the 2.8GHz by four percentage points. The faster bus and addition of the nForce2 platform gives the Athlon XP 2700+ a nice performance boost, but it isn’t able to catch up to Intel’s 2.53GHz Pentium 4.


SIDEBAR: Comdex is next week, NVIDIA is rumored to be announcing NV30 at the event.

Comanche 4

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Comanche 4 demo

Notes

Comanche 4 is one of the most CPU-bound tests we’ve come across this year, and seems to favor the Pentium 4 platform over the Athlon XP. The margin of victory for the 3GHz Pentium 4 is a little greater than it was in previous tests, with the chip running 6% faster than the 2.8GHz P4.


SIDEBAR: Intel actually won’t be attending Comdex this year. It makes sense though, considering they host their own developer forum every few months.

Unreal Tournament 2003

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Unreal Tournament 2003 - flyby

Notes

The 3.06GHz Pentium 4 continues to hold the crown in performance, finishing four percentage points ahead of the Athlon XP 2700+ at 800x600x32. The chip is able to put up an impressive fight however, as it is able to outgun Intel’s 2.8GHz Pentium 4.



SIDEBAR: We’re using the final copy of UT 2003 for this test, not the demo.

Business Winstone 2002

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Business Winstone 2002

Notes

We tried to run tests with Content Creation Winstone 2003 in addition to Winstone 2002 testing, but unfortunately we couldn’t complete that test with any of the systems used in this review. Business Winstone 2002 worked just fine however, and as you can see the Athlon XP 2700+ finished ahead of Pentium 4 3.06GHz. This has always been a weakness of the Pentium 4, rather than focus on the business applications that populate this test, the Pentium 4 was optimized for the bandwidth-hungry applications that are used in the Content Creation Winstone suite.



SIDEBAR: Look for the “HT” in the upper right corner of the Pentium 4 label for products that support Hyper-Threading.

Ballistics Report

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Pros

Hyper-Threading technology: While we experienced mixed results with Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology, we’re very enthusiastic about its potential. As it stands right now, the technology doesn’t really bring any benefits to gaming: Quake 3 is the only game out there that supports multi-threading and this feature is actually broken in the latest build of the game. As a result you’ll see a nice performance boost at low resolutions, but once you crank up the screen res it actually performs lower. Hopefully Carmack and other game developers will embrace multi-threading now that all of Intel’s upcoming processors will support it. While the user base is low today a year from now things have the potential to be dramatically different.

Until then, audio/video enthusiasts will love Hyper-Threading technology as it can offer some pretty nice performance boosts depending on how it is used. The desktop publishing market is another segment that may see some performance benefits today, although some of these guys may prefer to just go the dual CPU route.

The real beauty of Hyper-Threading though is that it’s essentially “free”. Even if you don’t like it, all you have to do is turn it off.

Performance: At 3,066MHz, this Pentium 4 chip is by no means a slouch when it comes to performance. And while the Athlon XP/nForce2 combo is pretty formidable, we’d have to give the nod in performance to the Pentium 4. Right now this is the fastest desktop processor money can buy. It’s as simple as that.

Overclocking: Normally we don’t go out on a limb to hype up the overclocking potential of a processor, after all results can vary from chip to chip. But when you see the results we obtained with the 3.06GHz Pentium 4 processor, it’s hard not to get excited about the overclocking potential of this chip -- we overclocked the CPU over 300MHz at stock voltage!

We were actually able to play Unreal Tournament 2003 and other games at clock speeds in excess of 3.6GHz, but in order to complete our full suite of tests we had to settle for 3.56GHz (23x155).

Cons

Price: At an official price of $637 when purchased in quantities of 1,000 processors, the 3.06GHz Pentium 4 is by no means an inexpensive upgrade. Hopefully Intel will release 2.66GHz and 2.8GHz processors with Hyper-Threading technology later this year. If not, consumers will likely have to wait until 2003 before price cuts make this CPU more affordable.

Infrastructure change: Those of you who purchased SiS 645 or 845D motherboards at the beginning of this year are probably pretty upset to see that your motherboard doesn’t support the Pentium 4 3.06GHz. We didn’t have much luck getting it to work with the ASUS P4B266 although we may dabble with it a bit more before we give up.

It took years for a solid alternative to the BX chipset to come out for the Pentium III, and while motherboard manufacturers hyped i845 up to be the next BX chipset, this obviously hasn’t been the case.

The 3.06GHz Pentium 4 also runs considerably warmer than previous chips, thus Intel has released a beefier cooling unit to keep heat at bay. If you decide to purchase an OEM Pentium 4 3.06GHz chip, you may want to keep this in mind before buying a skimpy cooler.



SIDEBAR: The 3GHz Pentium 4 hasn’t hit PriceWatch yet, but Intel has commenced shipments to OEM and retail channels, so chips should be available in the coming weeks.

Final Verdict

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