Pentium 4 Bench Test

The Pentium 4 Bench Test 
Architecture and Performance Charting Of Intel's New Flagship

By Dave Altavilla - November 20, 2000
 

We used three different platforms for comparison in our tests, a Pentium 3 i815E setup, a Athlon/T-Bird KT133 setup and the Pentium 4 i850 setup sent to us by Intel.  Here are the specifics for each.

Hot Hardware Test Systems Three amigos...

Intel Pentium 4 Test System:

• Intel D850GB i850 Motherboard, Pentium 4 Processor @ 1.5GHz.,

• 256MB of Samsung PC800 RAMBUS DRDRAM,

• IBM DTLA307045 45Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drive,

• nVidia GeForce 2 Ultra 64MB AGP Graphics Card,

• Intel 100tx PCI NIC, 56K PCI Modem

• Sound Blaster Live Sound Card,

• Hitachi DVD ROM Drive,

• Windows98SE (used for gaming benchmarks), Windows 2000Pro (used for Productivity and some Quake3 benchmarks),

• Direct X 8.0 (Direct X 7.0 used only for 3DMark Tests) and nVidia reference drivers version 6.31

• Intel chipset drivers version 2.60

Hot Hardware Pentium 3 Reference System:

• Abit SA6R i815E Motherboard, Pentium 3 Processor @ 1GHz.,

• 256MB of Corsair PC133 SDRAM

• IBM DTLA307045 45Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drive (thanks to Outside Loop!)

• nVidia GeForce 2 Ultra 64MB AGP Graphics Card,

• Netgear 10/100 PCI NIC, 56K PCI Modem

• Sound Blaster Live Sound Card,

• Pioneer 10X DVD ROM,

• Windows98SE (used for gaming benchmarks), Windows 2000Pro (used for Productivity and some Quake3 benchmarks),

• Direct X 8.0 (Direct X 7.0 used only for 3DMark Tests) and nVidia reference drivers version 6.31

• Intel chipset drivers version 2.60

Hot Hardware Athlon (T-Bird) Reference System:

• Abit KT7-RAID Motherboard, Athlon  Processor @ 1GHz.,

• 256MB of Corsair PC133 SDRAM

• IBM DTLA307045 45Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drive (thanks to Outside Loop!)

• nVidia GeForce 2 Ultra 64MB AGP Graphics Card,

• Netgear 10/100 PCI NIC, 56K PCI Modem

• Sound Blaster Live Sound Card,

• Pioneer 10X DVD ROM,

• Windows98SE (used for gaming benchmarks), Windows 2000Pro (used for Productivity and some Quake3 benchmarks),

• Direct X 8.0 (Direct X 7.0 used only for 3DMark Tests) and nVidia reference drivers version 6.31

• VIA chipset drivers version 4.25

Well now, typically our system spec lists are not that long but it is important to know how a test is setup so that you can make meaningful comparisons with the scores you'll see shortly.  With three full systems on the bench, the hardware list gets long.

SiSoft Sandra Benchmarks / Comparison You'll need version 7.10 Sandra Professional 2001 for accurate P4 scores.

We are very pleased to be able to show you this next series of tests in the proper light.  Since the Pentium 4 was first rolled out in prototype quantities, SiSoft Sandra scores have been popping up on the net with numbers taken from the P4 and they are completely erroneous.  Older versions of Sandra 2000 (those before the release of Sandra 2001 version 7.10), don't recognize the P4 correctly and misreport its performance dramatically.  We have done tests in this section with SiSoft's Sandra 2001 which now supports the Pentium 4.

Sandra 2001 CPU Performance Test (click all images)

Integer performance of the Pentium 4 is shown as only marginally better than that of the 1GHz. Athlon or Pentium 3.  However, Floating point performance of the P4 is about 25% higher than either system in this test.

Sandra 2001 Multimedia Performance Test

Here we begin to see one of the P4's strong suits.  New SSE2 instructions accelerate the P4 past the P3 and Athlon in this test, by approximately 8 to 12%. 

Sandra 2001 System Memory Bandwidth Performance

This test within the Sandra benchmark suite measure the entire system's memory bandwidth and performance not just actual DRAM performance.  Here the P4's "Quad Pumped" Dual Channel RAMBUS subsystem that feeds the 1.5GHz. core of the CPU, totally crushes the other two systems.  Memory bandwidth is no longer an issue for the Pentium architecture.  On a side note, in case you weren't keeping tabs on the price of RAMBUS memory, a 128MB PC600 RIMM now sells for about $120 on search engines like Pricewatch.  Intel needs RAMBUS to be affordable for the P4 to succeed in the first half of 2001.  Later in the second half of 2001, we are aware that a PC133 implementation of the P4 might be in the works.  The fate of RAMBUS is still a little foggy but seeing it utilized here and boasting these types of numbers, the picture clears somewhat.  Perhaps this only adds to the confusion for some?

OK, let's move out from the synthetic to more "real world" application benchmarks.

Intel's Application Launcher, Winstone 2001 and more