Easing
into things here, we have SiSoft's Sandra benchmark.
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Benchmarks
at 1.7GHz. and beyond |
Making
it look easy |
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Sandra CPU 1.7G

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Sandra CPU 1.9G

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Sandra
Multimedia 1.7G
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Sandra
Multimedia 1.9G
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Sandra
Memory Test 1.7G
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Sandra
Memory Test 1.9G
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The
1.7GHz. Pentium 4 shows itself to be significantly
faster than the reference 1.2GHz. Athlon system in
the Sandra suite but really only in two main
areas. It is well known that the memory
bandwidth of the Intel "Quad Data Rate"
architecture along with PC800 RDRAM, is a
combination that is hard to beat. Furthermore,
this version of Sandra incorporates the all new SSE2
instructions in its Multimedia Test, so clearly the
P4 will shine there as well, since the Athlon
doesn't support it.
On a
side note, we did not run our 1.33GHz. Athlon test
system in this run of benchmarks, however we will
include it in all tests moving forward in this
review. Let's move out to more stringent
testing.
Content
Creation and Business Winstone 2001:


Here
the Pentium 4 doesn't look all that inspiring
frankly, against the Athlon at a much lower clock
speed. There are a number of reasons for
this. First and foremost, this benchmark suite
is heavily IO intensive. That is to say that
it is less demanding of compute intensive functions
and more demanding of system and user response
time. Here you can see that the 1.7G P4 is
hardly faster than even its 1.5G sibling. We
ran these tests several times to check for variances
but came back with the same results within a small
percentage window.
A
note on Sysmark 2001:
Due
to technical issues with this benchmark suite, we
were unable to incorporate this series of tests in
our review. However, we do encourage you to check
out Anandtech's Sysmark 2001 test of the Intel
Pentium 4 1.7GHz. processor. Here you'll
see the core strength of the Pentium 4 with its
excellent memory bandwidth and multitasking
capabilities, propel it into the lead.
Sysmark
2001 uses many of the same type of productivity and
content creation applications that Winstone
does. However, Sysmark 2001 focuses on
performance under a heavy load with multi-tasking,
much the same way an end user would run their
desktop. How many times have you run only
Adobe Photo Shop and nothing else? Perhaps you
were checking email and burning a CD at the same
time. It is this type of environment that
Sysmark 2001 tries to emulate. Since the time
of our testing for this article, we have become much
more comfortable with Sysmark 2001 and will be
incorporating it in CPU and Motherboard reviews in
the future.
More
"Pro" Testing with SPEC viewperf and
3DMark 2001!
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