Moving away from the Megahertz Myth

Two of the key performance components of any computer system regardless of platform differences are still the processor and the video card that you pair it with. With today's variety of processor families, multiple socket types for each processor family and multiple core types, the days where performance is measured strictly by megahertz is over. Although clockrate has long been used as a selling point, Megahertz alone has never told the whole story and it is surprising to see it last so long as a performance quantifier. This was true back in 1997 with the K6 and Pentium 2. A P2 would beat the pants off of a K6 clock for clock. There is still an analogous situation today. A Celeron running at 3.4 Gigahertz is not the same as a 3.4 Gigahertz P4 Northwood nor is it the same as a 3.4 Gigahertz P4 Prescott nor is it the same as a 3.4 Gigahertz P4-EE.

Because of the overemphasis on clockrates rather than performance, Intel has done away with strictly using megahertz to denote performance and instead they have moved towards a three digit system with the first digit denoting the family and the other two digits representing the processor's position on the performance totem for that particular family. The 540, 550, 560 denote the 3.2 to 3.6 Ghz Prescott core Pentium 4s respectively.

Today we embark on a somwhat large undertaking looking at three distinct processor cores at 5 different clockrates on three different platforms. The venerable socket 478 is represented by a Northwood core Pentium 4 3.2 and the 478 Gallatin core Pentium 4 EE. On the LGA-775 side, we have an additional two platforms with the 915G and the 925x along with two distinct processors, a Prescott 3.6 and a 3.4EE. Because our Prescott is unlocked we also dropped it to 3.2 and 3.4 Ghz and tested at those speeds. The result is ten different board and processor combinations on the Intel side. We do not cover platform features in this particular piece but be sure to check out our Intel Platform Technologies article where we cover the 915/925x and their associated feature sets.