Intel i925X and i915G Architecture, Pentium 4 560 and 3.4GHz EE - The LGA775 Debut

More of synthetic benchmark, with it's weighted scoring system, PCMark 2004 also runs Processor and Memory tests with real world computing work loads.

Futuremark PCMark04 More Synthetic CPU and Memory Benchmarks

"The CPU test suite is a collection of tests that are run to isolate the performance of the CPU. There are nine tests in all. Two pairs of tests are run multithreaded - each test in the pair is run in its own thread.  The remaining five tests are run single threaded. These tests include such functions as file encryption, decryption, compression and decompression, grammar check, audio conversion, WMV and DivX video compression."

Intel's new P4 560 reigns supreme here, with its pure clock speed advantage over all other CPUs in the field.  It's also interesting to note how the i915 and i925 based systems here, pull out slightly ahead of their i875 counterparts.  The Athlon 64 brings up the rear but this will be one of the few times you'll see this happen in our performance showcase.

"The Memory test suite is a collection of tests that isolate the performance of the memory subsystem. The memory subsystem consists of various devices on the PC. This includes the main memory, the CPU internal cache (known as the L1 cache) and the external cache (known as the L2 cache). As it is difficult to find applications that only stress the memory, we explicitly developed a set of tests geared for this purpose. The tests are written in C++ and assembly. They include: Reading data blocks from memory, Writing data blocks to memory performing copy operations on data blocks, random access to data items and latency testing."

Here in PCMark's Memory test, we're given a hint as to how memory latency sensitive certain applications can be.  The Athlon 64's integrated memory controller allows it to pull down top rank, followed by the P4 EE/i875 combination and then the P4 560 - i925X/i915 systems.  Again given lower latency DDR2 memory modules, the picture may have been completely different for the Alderwood and Grantsdale systems.

3DMark03 DirectX Gaming Performance - CPU Test

It's not an actual game, but 3DMark03's built-in CPU test is a "gaming related" DirectX metric that's useful for comparing relative performance among similarly equipped systems.  This test consists of two different 3D scenes that are generated with a software renderer, which is dependant on the host CPU's performance.  This means that the calculations normally reserved for your 3D accelerator, are instead sent to the central processor.  The number of frames generated per second in each test are used to determine the final score.

Game, set and match goes to the Athlon 64s here but as we can see, this test also seems memory bandwidth sensitive.  All of the Pentium 4 EE based systems took the lead in Intel's camp.  Additionally, the i925 and i915 system show a slight edge over their i875 based siblings.