Intel Pentium 4 6XX Sequence and 3.73GHz Extreme Edition Processors

SiSoft Sandra is our first test of the Pentium 4 660 and Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.37GHz chips. The following tests were all done in standard Windows XP Pro 32-bit mode.

SiSoft Sandra Synthetic Testing Performance Snapshot

Pentium 4 660 (3.6GHz) - CPU, Multimedia, Memory, and Cache Tests

Pentium 4 3.73GHz Extreme Edition - CPU, Multimedia, Memory, and Cache Tests

The P4 660 and P4 EE 3.73 post CPU and Multimedia test scores right on top of or slightly above similarly clocked Prescott core processors in the reference listings of Sandra. A P4 660 is actually a bit faster than a P4 560, and the 3.73GHz Extreme Edition posts right in line with a P4 570, which is actually clocked at 3.8GHz. In Memory and cache testing they also put up very robust performance numbers, especially the P4 EE 3.73, which shows an impressive 6568MBps of memory bandwidth in Sandra's Stream based Memory benchmark.

3DMark05 CPU Test Synthetic CPU Gaming Test

For a simple synthetic CPU test, we chose Futuremark's 3DMark05 CPU Test module.  Here's a refresher from a Futuremark White Paper on 3DMark05, which covers this section of the test suite:

"As in the previous 3DMark version, the CPU test runs game tests in low resolution using software vertex processing and disabled post-processing. This decreases the graphics card workload, and makes the test result reflect above all the CPU's performance rendering 3D scenes and performing other 3D game related tasks like performing matrix calculations. The CPU test also uses fixed frame rendering to further ensure the workload stays the same for all systems."
 

The Pentium 4s all sweep this synthetic gaming test, with the new 6XX sequence P4s showing muscle in their 2MB L2 caches. Interestingly a 3.4GHz P4 650 is about as fast as a 3.6GHz P4 560 chip in this test, and the older Gallatin core-based 3.46GHz Extreme Edition P4 struggles to keep pace with the 650, as well.