Test Setup
| Header Cell - Column 0 | Pentium 4 System | Athlon System |
|---|---|---|
| Motherboard | Asus P4T, Bios 1005 beta 1 | MSI MS-6341, pre-release BIOS |
| Memory | 256 MB Samsung PC800 RDRAM | 256 MB Mircron PC2100 DDR-SDRAM, CL2, Setting 8-8-5-2-2-2-2 |
| Hard Drive | IBM DTLA 307030, 30 GB, 7200 RPM, ATA100, FAT32 (Win98) / NTFS (Win2k) | |
| Network Card | NetGear FA310TX | |
| Graphics Card | NVIDIA GeForce 2 Ultra Reference Card, Driver 667 (Win98/Win2k) | |
| Power Supply | 400 W | |
| Operating System | Windows 98 SE / Windows 2000 Professional Service Pack 1 | |
| Desktop Screen Resolution | 1024x768x16x85 | |
| Quake 3 Arena | Retail Version | |
| Unreal Tournament | 4.28 | |
| Evolva | Demo | |
| Dronez | Demo | |
| MDK2 | Demo | |
| Mercedes Benz Truck Racing | Demo | |
| Flask MPEG | 5.94, DivX 3.11 |
Overclocking
Due to time constraints as well as system stability considerations I did not include any test runs of overclocked Pentium 4 1.7 GHz processors. I simply dislike the fact that you have to run processor bus clock, memory clock, AGP-clock as well as PCI-clock out of spec to get Pentium 4 to higher core clock speeds. Overclocked memory, as well as out-of-spec operating AGP and PCI-buses pose a significant stability threat to an overclocked Pentium 4 system. This is a big pity, since Pentium 4 would otherwise have big potential to reach rather high core clocks. Owners of AMD's Athlon and Duron processors are in a much better situation, because they neither have to run processor bus or system memory out of spec, nor do they need to overclock the AGP or PCI-bus to reach higher processor core clocks.
