Test Setup

Processors

Intel Pentium 4 3.2C Socket 478 (Northwood)
Intel Pentium 4 3.2EE (Gallatin)
Intel Pentium 4 3.6 LGA-775 (Prescott)
Intel Pentium 4 3.4 LGA-775 (Prescott)
Intel Pentium 4 3.2 LGA-775 (Prescott)
Intel Pentium 4 3.4EE LGA-775 (Gallatin)

Motherboards

(i875) Intel i875PBZ
(915g) Soltek SL-915GPro-FGR
(925x) Gigabyte GA-8ANXP-D

Memory

OCZ PC3200 2x512MB
OCZ PC2-5400 2x512MB

Videocards

ATI 9600XT
ATI X600 XT

4.11 Betas

Hard drive

WD1200 120GB PATA

Benchmarks

SiSoft Sandra 2004
PCMark 04

PCMag Business Winstone 2004
PCMag Multimedia Winstone 2004

LAME MP3 Encoding
TMPGEnc MPEG2 Encoding
Xvid MPEG4 Encoding
POV Ray

Comanche 4
Call of Duty
X2 Rolling Demo
Counter Strike: Source

Test Notes -

In hindsight we should have used something a little more powerful than the 9600XT/X600XT but they were the closest pair of AGP vs PCIe cards in terms of specifications that we had on hand for testing. Doing a run with the memory on the X600XT scaled down to 9600XT levels showed almost no difference in most of the gaming benchmarks to about 2% for X2. A second item of note is the lack of onboard sound on the 875PBZ board which may also inflate scores slightly. We decided to forego the Counter Strike: Source test for the 875 platform because timedemos seem to set sound quality to medium regardless of settings before the benchmark was run. Comanche 4, Call of Duty, and X2: Rolling Demo round up the gaming tests.

On the purely synthetic benchmark front we have SiSoft Sandra's CPU Arithmetic Test as well as PCMark04's memory test. Memory tests on Sandra did not vary much - memory scores on the same platform were just about even regardless of the processor. PCMark04's memory test results are a bit more interesting - these are memory intensive operations as opposed to a straight memory bandwidth test that Sandra uses.

Supplementing our purely synthetic benchmarks are some numbers from desktop usage simulation benchmarks in PCMag's Business Winstone and Multimedia Winstone.

POV Ray gets a category of its own as one of the more popular ray tracing programs out there.

Another focus is on media encoding with the emergence of PVRs and HTPCs as a growing trend for desktop PC usage. We have included benchmarks of LAME MP3 Encoding, TMPGEnc MPEG2 Encoding and Xvid MPEG4 encoding.

As mentioned, the Prescott 3.2 & 3.4 was the 3.6 with the multiplier dropped to obtain the proper speed. If there are any concerns, comments about our benchmark settings or methodology feel free to contact us.