Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz Prescott
And Pentium 4 3.4GHz  Extreme Edition
Significant changes in P4 architecture bring future scalability

By, Dave Altavilla
February 1, 2004

Prescott And Pentium 4 EE Vital Signs
Speeds, feeds, temps and overclocking

There really isn't much to see with Prescott, unless you decided to pull off it's heat spreader to see the die below.  The package is of course Intel's standard 478 pin mPGA that has been shipping with Northwood for years now.  Later on this year, higher speed Prescott CPUs will come in LGA-775 (775 pin Land Grid Array) packages.  This is when Prescott really takes off but for now, it's business as usual.  We've also taken shots of the new P4 3.4GHz Extreme Edition CPU we received for testing.

   

   

We took some readings with Intel's Desktop Control Center software while running on their i875 Bonanza board.  Prescott surprisingly is a bit hot under the hood, as you can see in the screen shots below.  However, that didn't hold us back from overclocking it.


3.2GHz Prescott
Vital Signs

3.4GHz Pentium 4 EE
Vital Signs

Prescott 3.2GHz
Overclocked @ 3.6GHz+
230MHzX16

Pentium 4 Extreme Edition
Overclocked @ 3.8GHz+
225MHzX17

These tests were taken on an open air test bench, not inside a closed ATX PC chassis.  As a result, temps recorded here are actually lower than they would be in a close system.  As you can see, Prescott runs about 10C warmer than the already spicy temps of the P4 EE processor.  In actuality, while under load and installed in a closed case, the 3.2GHz Prescott CPU we tested ran at an average of 57 - 60C.  The 3.4GHz P4EE we tested settled down at 50C under load.  Process optimizations and the new LGA-775 package should allow these temps to fall in the future, unless of course you're running the core at 4GHz.  Which brings us to overclocking.  The 3.2GHz Prescott P4 we tested hit a stable speed of 3.69GHz while overclocked and the 3.4GHz P4 Extreme Edition hit 3.84GHz.  Easy money...

HotHardware Prescott Ready Test Systems
Not all are created equal...

How we configured our test systems:
We tried to ensure that all of our test systems were configured as similarly as possible for this review.  Both of the Athlon 64 systems and the P4 system system were equipped with identical hardware, with the obvious exceptions being the motherboards and processors.  The same applied to the Athlon 64 FX-51 system, but because it required registered DIMMs, the memory was different as well.  The video cards, hard drives, driver versions (where applicable) and OS configurations were identical.  Our Pentium 4 systems were setup on an i875 Canterwood based motherboard from DFI for optimal performance.  Before we started benchmarking, we entered the system BIOS and set each board to their "Optimized Defaults"We then configured our RAM to run at 200MHz (DDR400), with the timings set by the SPD.  The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows XP Professional (SP1) was installed.  When the installation was complete, we hit the Windows Update site and downloaded all of the available updates, with the exception of the ones related to Windows Messenger.

Then we installed all of the necessary drivers, and removed Windows Messenger from the system altogether.  Auto-Updating and System Restore were disabled as well, and we setup a 768MB permanent page file on the same partition as the Windows installation.  Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance", installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives and ran all of the tests.

 
SYSTEM 1:
Intel Pentium 4
3.2GHz Northwood
3.2 GHz Prescott
3.2GHz Extreme Edition
3.4GHz Extreme Edition

DFI LANPARTY Pro875B Motherboard
   Intel 875P Chipset
2x512MB Kingston PC3500
   CL2 - HyperX DIMMS
GeForce FX 5900 Ultra
On-Board 10/100 Ethernet
On-Board Audio
WD "Raptor" 36GB Hard Drive
   10,000 RPM SATA

Windows XP Pro SP1
Detonator FX 51.75 Drivers
DirectX 9.0b
 

 
SYSTEM 2:
AMD Athlon FX-51
2.2GHz Processor

Asus SK8N Motherboard
   nForce3 Pro 150 Chipset
2x512MB Infineon PC3200
   CL2.5 ECC Registered
GeForce FX 5900 Ultra
On-Board 10/100 Ethernet
On-Board Audio
WD "Raptor" 36GB Hard Drive
   10,000 RPM SATA

Windows XP Pro SP1
Detonator FX 51.75 Drivers
DirectX 9.0b
 

 
SYSTEM 3:
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz)
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (2.2GHz)

Shuttle FN85 Motherboard
   nForce3 Pro 150 Chipset
2x512MB Kingston PC3500
   CL2 - HyperX DIMMS
GeForce FX 5900 Ultra
On-Board 10/100 Ethernet
On-Board Audio
WD "Raptor" 36GB Hard Drive
   10,000 RPM SATA

Windows XP Pro SP1
Detonator FX 51.75 Drivers
DirectX 9.0b
 

Are you Prescott ready?
When it comes to Prescott compatibility, things are still a bit dicey at this point in time, with respect to motherboard solutions that are currently on the market.  In fact, we went through a total 6 motherboards from various manufacturers, with varying degrees of success.  In every case, we had to request special unreleased BIOS updates for the boards we were testing with, to ensure that our Prescott CPU would even boot properly.  In some cases, heat issues off the MOSFET power arrays caused instability, even with a motherboard we had in that claimed "Prescott ready" right on the box.

Boards That Worked

DFI LANParty Pro875 B

Intel D875PBZ "Bonanza"

 

We would like to extend special thanks to our friends at DFI who came through in the clutch, with an overnight shipment of their recently released LANParty Pro875 revision "B" board, which after a BIOS update, worked flawlessly with Prescott and even allowed us to overclock things to a fair degree.  One bit of advice for anyone considering a new P4 Prescott based system, check with the motherboard manufacturer for a list of Prescott ready boards and even then, go with a mainstream name like Abit, Asus, DFI, MSI, Soyo or Tyan.  Then make sure you keep good air circulation in your case, especially around the area of the CPU, where the MOSFET power array can get pretty steamy under load. 

 

Synthetics - SANDRA and PC Mark 2004