Intel's New Pentium 4 Processor

Overclocking

Many of the overclockers of this world were afraid that Pentium 4's quad-pumped 100 MHz bus would make bus overclocking of this processor as difficult and restrictive as with Athlon and its dual-pumped 133/100 MHz-bus. I can bring you the surprisingly positive news that Pentium 4 is as overclockable as Intel processors always have been. You can imagine that the multiplier of official Pentium 4 processors will be locked, but with a good P4-motherboard you won't have any problems overclocking the bus.

I took advantage of the jumperless-mode of the Asus P4T-motherboard and managed to let two different Pentium 4 processors run at up to 125 MHz bus clock. I even included a 1.4 GHz Pentium 4 overclocked to 14 x 115 MHz = 1610 MHz as well as the evaluation 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 overclocked to 16 x 108 MHz = 1728 MHz in the benchmark results. I only had to raise the voltage from 1.7 to 1.8 V. There was no thermal issue, as Pentium 4 heat sinks are already designed for much higher heat dissipation than what current Pentium 4 processors are actually able to produce.

Benchmark Considerations

Due to time constraints we were only able to do run full benchmark suite under Windows 98, but I also added the Linux Kernel Compilation. We have already done a major part of the Windows 2000 benchmarks and will supply them shortly. Intel supplied a lot of special benchmarking software for Pentium 4, which we will evaluate, run and publish in the next few days.

After what we have learned in the architectural part of this article, we should expect Pentium 4 to show excellent performance in all benchmarks that are heavily integer based and the ones that take great advantage of the new high-speed bus between processor, system and memory. SSE2-optimized software should obviously run very fast on Pentium 4 as well. Although Intel claims that Pentium 4 has the worlds best floating point performance we know that in reality the normal FPU of Pentium 4 is hardly even able to live up to Pentium III standards. Only floating point applications that use SSE2 could possibly support Intel's bold claim. Today's standard software is obviously not yet SSE2-optimized, so that standard FPU-intensive software will probably run rather slow on Pentium 4 systems.

Benchmark Setup

To enable Pentium 4's SSE2 we installed DirectX 8 on all the test platforms. We were using our standard NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS graphics card, but had to find out that the latest available and DX8-enabled driver rev. 7.17 is performing very poorly in 3D as well as 2D applications on all of the test systems. Therefore we decided to use the reliable 6.31 driver.