Author: Ed Panek
Date: 13:16:06 03/29/01
One of the most important considerations in overclocking the Pentium 4 is the
motherboard
on which it will reside. ASUS' P4T was our choice due to its stability and
flexibility in front side bus, multiplier, and voltage options. Additionally,
the P4T includes a patent-pending metal back plate to make the Pentium 4
motherboard design specs compatible with existing cases. However, you will still
need a power supply with the extra 12V power connector complying with the ATX
2.03 specification. We also made the decision to use Intel's stock cooling. At
400 grams, the Pentium 4's supplied cooling is designed to cool future
processors that will be running much faster than 1.5GHz. Moreover, with a base
forged of copper and aluminum fins, the heatsink is already optimized for heat
absorption and dissipation.
It is very important to remember that RIMMs must be purchased in pairs to
occupy both RDRAM channels present on boards with the i850 chipset. For our
tests, we used two 128MB RIMMs - one in bank A1, and the other in B1.
Continuity modules, which are normally provided by the motherboard manufacturer,
must be installed into the empty memory banks.
For this round of testing we kept the front side bus of our P4T at a constant
100MHz, changing only the multiplier frequency to give you a better idea of how
Pentium 4 performance scales. For those of you with multiplier-locked Pentium
4's, this will give you a good idea how your processor fares at its default
setting in relation to the other available members of the P4 family.
Sandra 2001
SiSoft's Sandra 2001
Win 2000 Pro (MB/sec.)
1.4GHz(14x100) 1.5GHz(15x100) 1.6GHz(16x100)
Memory Bandwidth CPU 1484 1378 1493
Memory BandwidthFPU 1523 1451 1522
CPU: ALU 2701 2955 3076
CPU: FPU 1720 1760 1966
CPU: SSE Integer 5549 5956 6347
CPU: SSE Floating Point 6856 7362 7791
For the most part, memory bandwidth between these processors should remain
fluid, since the frequency of the front side bus is not changing. Repeated tests
n Sandra introduce variations of around 100MB/s, so we'll accept our results as
accurate, despite the differences.
Results from the CPU and Multimedia benchmarks also demonstrate fairly
uniform results, showing a pretty linear increase in performance as the Pentium
4 ramps up in clock frequency.
It is well known that integer performance is the weakest feature of the Pentium
4's overall performance. Nevertheless, a 200MHz clock speed increase buys the
Pentium 4 an additional 14% performance. We will be pitting an overclocked
Athlon against the Pentium 4 in an upcoming Overclocking Special Report, but
for the time being, take our word for it when we say the Athlon is currently
faster value if these sorts of office-based applications are your bread and
butter (and the situation will remain unchanged until SSE2 optimized application
make their way onto the market).
SiSoft's Sandra 2001
Win 2000 Pro (MB/sec.)
1.6GHz 1.733GHz 1.819GHz 1.8GHZ
Mem Bandwidth CPU 1493 1600 1576 1709
Mem Bandwidth FPU 1522 1631 1596 1789
CPU: ALU 3076 3339 3491 3470
CPU: FPU 1966 2122 2231 2199
CPU: SSE Integer 6347 6879 7201 7103
CPU: SSEFloatingPoint 7791 8434 8857 8804
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