Pentium 4 670 3.8GHz Performance Profile
Test System and Vital Signs
Here we've detailed our test system configurations for the various platforms and processors that we have test results for in the following pages.
How we configured our test systems: When configuring the test systems for this showcase, we first entered system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults." The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows XP Professional (SP2) was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed the rest of the necessary drivers and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were disabled, and we set up a 768MB permanent page file on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.
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| SYSTEM 1: AMD Athlon 4000+ (2.4GHz) AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 (2.6GHz) AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (2.4GHz) (Dual Core CPU) ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe (NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI) 2x512MB Corsair PC3200 Pro CL 2-2-2-5 GeForce 6800 GT On-board Ethernet On-board Audio WD "Raptor" HD 10,000 RPM SATA Windows XP Pro SP2 nForce 4 Drivers v6.53 NVIDIA Forceware v71.89 DirectX 9.0c |
SYSTEM 2: Pentium 4 670 - 3.8GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition (3.73GHz) Pentium Extreme Edition 840 (3.2GHz) (Dual Core CPU) ASUS P5ND2-SLI (nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition) 2x512MB Corsair DDR2-667 CL 3-2-2-7 GeForce 6800 GT On-board Ethernet On-board Audio WD "Raptor" HD 10,000 RPM SATA Windows XP Pro SP2 nForce 4 Drivers v7.02 NVIDIA Forceware v71.89 DirectX 9.0c |
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A quick check with CPU-Z shows the Pentium 4 670 as expected. We see a full 2MB of Level 2 cache accompanied by 16KB L1 data cache. Its core is set to operate with an 800MHz frontside bus (200MHz QDR) and a 19X multiplier. In terms of instruction set support, the P4 670 supports MMX extensions up through SSE3 and of course x86-64 64-bit extensions for true 64-bit computation. The testing scope of our article doesn't cover 64-bit performance, however. If you are interested in 64-bit performance metrics for Pentium 4 6XX sequence processors, have a quick look at our launch article from February. As it stands today, there isn't much use in covering 64-bit performance simply because there are so few mainstream applications written currently to take advantage of 64-bit architectures.
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Next we took a look at the new Pentium 4 670's thermal profile, on an open air bench test setup utilizing a stock Intel heatsink with an ambient room temperature of about 68o F.
At stock speed and sitting idle, the Pentium 4 670 operates at a tepid 41o C baseline. The thermal profile of the new P4 6XX sequence CPUs are a big improvement since the early days of the Prescott core.
In our full load test, we've fired up both Prime 95 and a Folding at Home client instance in the background, which effectively pegs the processor core at 100% utilization. After about 15 minutes of this stress test, we saw the new P4 670 stabilize at 60oC, which again is a solid improvement, since we've historically seen temps in the mid to high 60s even from lower clock speed Prescott cores.
