By,
Dave Altavilla
February 1, 2004
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Prescott And Pentium 4 EE Vital Signs |
Speeds, feeds, temps and overclocking |
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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...
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HotHardware Prescott Ready Test Systems |
Not
all are created equal... |
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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
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Intel D875PBZ "Bonanza"
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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 |