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By,
Dave Altavilla
March 22, 2004
We haven't been
able to work enough with Unreal Tournament 2004 as of yet,
since the game was recently released to retail not long ago.
However, we plan to have it replace UT2003 in our benchmark
suite in the future, once we have a better handle on testing
with it and characterizing performance across a number of
platforms.
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Unreal Tournament 2003 |
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DirectX Gaming Performance |
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Two words, game
over. The numbers speak for themselves, the Pentium 4s
got smoked across the board. If you're a hard core
UT2003 player, the fastest CPU money can buy for you right
now is an Athlon 64 FX-53 by a long shot.
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X2
The Threat Rolling Demo |
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DirectX 9 Gaming Performance |
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Conversely, if
you are the Space Sim / Real-time Strategy type that will
spend hours orchestrating battles with Egosoft's gorgeous
new X2-The Threat, you may want to opt for a Pentium 4. In
addition, a 3.4GHz Prescott variant may provide the best
price / performance return on your investment.
In the final
analysis of our look at the new 3.4GHz Prescott and
Northwood based Pentium 4 processors, we could ramble on in
flowery detail about these new speed bins and their relative
performance across the benchmarks and in various application
or gaming scenarios. The net result, however, is that
depending on what type of user you are and what type of
software you like to run, both Intel and AMD platforms have
their strong suits. If you are a multimedia or digital
video buff, the Pentium 4 with optimized SSE applications
and Hyperthreading for multitasking and multithreaded apps,
certainly has its advantages. Gamers and general
business application users (which by the way comprises a
large portion of our audience here) might find more robust
performance with the Athlon 64. At the end of the day,
these new 3.4GHz variants of the Pentium 4, both Northwood
and Prescott, are what they are, so to speak. They're
a little bit faster, on the order of about 3-5% in most
areas and also a bit warmer under general operating
conditions. What the Pentium 4 really needs now is its
new home, in the forthcoming Grantsdale and Alderwood
chipset based platforms. Prescott's new LGA-775 (Land
Grid Array) package will hopefully keep thermals more in
check and DDR2, along with PCI-Express, will hopefully
provide another quick burst of available system bandwidth
that the platform desperately needs at this point.
Q2 is right
around the corner and we hope in the near future, we can
come back to you here with an update on what is truly the
end game for Prescott. For now it's almost as if
Prescott is just getting warmed up, literally and
figuratively perhaps.
Bring us your
tired, weary and BSODs.
Make
everything right as rain in the PC Hardware Forum!
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