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Ah yes, finally we'll pay
homage to the gamers out there. After all, who doesn't
game on their PC these days? Well, at least we like
to, when we can take a break from testing here in lab (a
rarity unfortunately). So without further delay, let's
get some 3DMarks laid down and then we'll Quake.
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3DMark 2001SE and Quake 3 Arena Benchmarks |
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Like Baseball,
Hot-Dogs, Apple Pie and... err... never mind |
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First our
friends at
the angry or somewhat mentally disturbed Onion, will
have their say on which Pentium 4 setup is the fastest, with
their omnipotent 3DMark 2001SE benchmark.
"i850E, PC1066 and SiS645dx"
scores are representative of a 533MHz system bus
Once again, as
we saw in the Flask MPEG test, the new 533MHz system bus
driven Pentium 4, along with PC1066 RDRAM, drives the most
impressive scores here. As a matter of fact, these are
some of the best scores we've ever seen on a stock GeForce4
Ti 4600 card. Furthermore, the Athlon XP 2100+ remains
conservative to its naming convention, showing just a hair
less than Pentium 4 2.2GHz performance, on a standard i850
system with PC800 memory. However, add a 533MHz FSB
and some PC1066 memory and we could easily surmise that a
2.26GHz Pentium 4B, would leave the XP 2100+ behind.
Finally, our
reference SiS645dx system was just not up to the task of
completing this test. For some reason it was crashing
out to the desktop and we couldn't get a valid score.
It seems the board we tested, to remain nameless for now,
still needs a little more work.
Last but
certainly not least, Quake 3 Arena.
"i850E, PC1066 and SiS645dx"
scores are representative of a 533MHz system bus
Here the picture
is not much different in the Quake 3 Time Demo test.
Again, we set this test up to run at a very low resolution
and color depth, so that the GeForce4 Ti 4600 graphics card
could run flat out and not hold back the CPU. Take a
look at the very respectable showing from the SiS645dx board
with a 533MHz FSB Pentium 4 and PC2700 RDRAM. This
board actually beat out the i850E by a fairly significant 6
frames per second. This one data point shows great
promise for the SiS645dx chipset, as a very cost effective
alternative to an RDRAM based i850E system.
Intel has
clearly taken a very comfortable performance lead over arch
rival AMD, with this latest release of the Pentium 4
processor. In the tests you've seen here, we've taken
the highest speed Athlon and paired it with the best system
board, chipset and memory money can buy and then compared
the results to the Pentium 4B across multiple platforms.
The moral of the story is that Intel has a definitive edge
with respect to overall system performance, at this
juncture.
However, the
tech savvy consumer will also understand the the AMD Athlon
XP's price/performance ratio is significantly better than
Intel's right now. An equivalent performing chip like
the 2.2GHz P4 versus the Athlon XP 2100+, will cost the end
user approximately $150 more, based on current street price
figures. The top of the line 2.4GHz Pentium 4B and
2.53GHz P4s, are being priced at $562 and $637 respectively,
in lots of 1,000 pcs., at the time of this launch.
That is a hefty price to pay for a CPU for sure.
Perhaps a more practical approach would be the 2.26GHz
Pentium 4B, priced at $423 in 1,000 piece volumes.
However, if your budget allows you to buy the fastest PC
money can buy, their is only one solution currently, a
Pentium 4 with a 533MHz system bus. The Thoroughbreds
are coming as well. We'll see how the landscape
changes again at that point but for now, it's advantage
Intel.
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