Pentium 4 3.2GHz w/ 800MHz System Bus

Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz Performance Evaluation
Another speed bump served up by Intel with ease

By, Dave Altavilla
June 23, 2003
 

 
Before we get into the benchmarks, please take a look at our system specifications, so you can get a feel for our test methodology.  Our platform of choice was the Canterwood based DFI LANParty Pro875 motherboard.  This board is perfect for the test bench, with its on board push-button on/off and reset switches.  It is also built on Intel's highest performing i875P "Canterwood" chipset, with Dual Channel DDR400 support and an 800MHz System Bus.

HotHardware's Test Systems It's got game

P4 3.2GHz CPUID
Pentium 4 Stepping ID: 9
 

WCPUID informs us here that the stepping of this new P4 has also not changed.  The 3.2GHz Pentium 4 also has a stepping ID of 9, as does its 3.0GHz predecessor.  The processor's multiplier is 16X, with a 200MHz Front Side Bus (also known as System Bus) and the i875's DDR Memory Controller and the Motherboard's DDR PLL then clock double this 200MHz signal, for a DDR 400MHz memory timing.  The P4 System Bus is a Quad Pumped 800MHz multiple off the 200MHz base bus frequency.  The bandwidth within the latest Pentium 4 System Architecture is robust and well balanced.

Pentium 4 3.2GHz SiSoft Sandra Testing 3200 MHz With Hyperthreading

First, a quick take with a few SiSoftware's SANDRA (System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) benchmarks, which will show us performance levels relative to a few reference system scores, in SANDRA's database.

As you'll note, our test system with the 3.2GHz Pentium 4, is the fastest on the charts, topping the highest performance machine noted in SANDRA's new "SANDRA Max3" version of the software.  An Athlon XP 3200+, as well as an Opteron 1.8GHz system, are noted here, both of which fall well short of our i857P 3.2GHz Pentium 4 test-bed, in all the tests we ran.

Overclocking The 3.2GHz P4 - Stock Cooling And The Vapochill 4GHz anyone?

We're the types that like to eat our dessert first here at HotHardware.  Hey, life is short, right?  So, we might as well overclock this new Pentium 4 early and often.  We'll dig into rigorous multi-scenario benchmarking shortly but for now, let's just have a little fun. First we fired up this new 3.2GHz Pentium 4, with the stock cooler that came with the chip.  Then, we plugged it into our Vapochill test system and took the temperatures into the sub-zero C range.

CPUID 3.68GHz Air Cooled

CPUID 4GHz Vapochilled

With standard air cooling, we were able to hit a 230MHz FSB at 3.68GHz, with full stability.  Perhaps we would have reached 3.7GHz or higher with a higher end P4 cooler but this was still fairly impressive, at almost 500MHz over its stock speed.  We needed to bump the core voltage to 1.65V to achieve this.

However, when we dropped the new CPU into our Vapochill SE test system, amazing things started to happen.  We were able to load and run a few benchmarks in WinXP at 4GHz, the first time we hit this mark in our labs, with any stability.  We've included a few SANDRA runs here for your viewing pleasure.  However, at 4GHz the system did not pass our full stability testing and we settled back to 3.9GHz in the Vapochill, again at 1.65V core voltage.

Coming back down to earth, we resume our regularly schedule programming of the latest benchmarks, with the new 3.2GHz Pentium 4 versus the best AMD has to offer in the Desktop space, the Athlon XP 3200+.