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Our test systems consisted of the following hardware:

• ASUS P5ND2-SLI motherboard (nForce 4 for Intel)
• 2*512 MB Corsair XMS2 PC5400UL RAM @ 3-2-2-7-2-1T
• DFI LanParty nF4 SLI-DR motherboard (AMD systems)
• 2*512 MB OCZ PC4000 Gold Edition VX RAM @ 2-2-2-8-1T (AMD systems)
• OCZ ModStream 520W power supply (AMD systems)
• FSP BlueStorm 500W power supply
• Western Digital 1200JD SATA hard drive
• NVIDIA Reference 6600GT 128 MB PCIe video card

The main focus of this review will be on the benefit of continuing to scale the Pentium 4's clock speed, and whether 3.8 GHz is enough to best the Athlon 64s, which have established themselves as kings in certain benchmarks. Keep in mind that the Pentium 4 670 has 2 MB of L2 cache, whereas our Pentium 4 560 has 1 MB.

On the AMD side, I'll be comparing the Pentium 670 to an Athlon 64 Venice at 2.4 GHz and 2.2 GHz, as well as the Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (it is priced at less than half of the Pentium 4 670). The 200 MHz difference between both the Pentium 4 560/670 and Venice 2.2/2.4 GHz should illustrate how efficient both architectures are at using up extra clock cycles.

To recap, the processors against which the Pentium 4 670 will be compared against are:

• Pentium 4 560 (3.6 GHz, 1 MB L2, 800 MHz FSB)
• Athlon 64 3500+ Venice (2.2 GHz, 512 KB L2)
• Athlon 64 3800+ Venice (2.4 GHz, 512 MB L2)
• Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (2.2 GHz + 512 KB L2 per core)

Software used during testing consisted of the following:

• Windows XP Service Pack 2
• NVIDIA ForceWare 66.93 drivers
• NVIDIA nForce 6.53 drivers
• CineBench 2003
• LAME MP3 Encoding
• PC Magazine Business Winstone 2004
• PC Magazine Multimedia Content Creation 2004
• POV-Ray 3.6
• POV-Ray 3.7 beta4
• RightMark Memory Analyzer
• SiSoft Sandra
• TMPGEnc MPEG2 Encoding
• WinRAR
• Call of Duty
• Comanche 4
• Doom 3
• FarCry
• Halo
• Half-Life 2
• Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• X2 Rolling Demo

Let's see what kind of tricks the Pentium 4 670 can pull out of its sleeve, shall we?