Review: Pentium 4 at 1,4, 1,5 and 1,6 GHz

Benchmark considerations

Two Pentium 4 parts hit our lab. The first one was supplied by Intel together with their own motherboard D850GB (Garribaldi). According to the chip maker all components were at production level. Dell's Dimension 8100 barely made it for this review. We took the chance and compared its results to Intel's setup. As there was no significant difference to Intel's system, we can state that these review systems were not tuned in any way.

To make the diagrams more readable we marked the CPUs as follows:

• Pentium 4 1x00: Pentium 4 at 400 MHz FS and 256 MByte PC800-DRDRAM

• Pentium III 1000 PC133: Pentium III at 133 MHz FSB and 256 MByte PC133-SDRAM

• Pentium III 1000 PC800: Pentium III at 133 MHz FSB and 256 MByte PC800-DRDRAM

• Athlon 1x00-200: Athlon at 200 MHz FSB and 256 MByte PC133-SDRAM

• Athlon 1200-266: Athlon at 266 MHz FSB and 256 MByte und 256 MByte PC266-DDR-SDRAM

All CPUs were socket versions, i.e. based on the Coppermine core for the Pentium III and the Thunderbird core for the Athlon. We ran all the benchmarks using the final version of DirectX 8.0. The numbers given for the Pentium 4 at 1600 MHz resulted from overclocking a CPU that was labeled at 1500 MHz.