Barton's Here: Athlon XP 3000+ vs. P4 3.06 GHz

Quake 3 Arena

All five time-demo runs of Quake 3 Arena point in the same direction. The Athlon CPUs with Barton cores benefit considerably from the double L2 cache. They still don't perform quite as well as the P4 at 3.06 GHz. How important or big the gap is may be a subjective opinion.