Intel Pentium 4 2.6c 800MHz FSB - Benchmarking

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BENCHMARKS

We decided to take a remotely unusual approach. We are going to compare this CPU at default speeds (with and without HT enabled) to a Pentium 4 3.0c at default speeds. This should show us a rough picture of the stock scaling of the chips. Also, to address whether or not the higher front side bus possibilities of this 2.6Ghz part over the 3.0Ghz part is significant or not, we have included the results with both chips running 3.51Ghz. The 2.6 will be running at 272MHz front side bus, while the 3.0c will be running at a much tamer 234Mhz front side bus. If nothing else this should be interesting.

The Test Boxes

System 1

Pentium4 2.6c (Default, no HT, and at 3.51GHz[13x272MHz])
ABIT IS7 Springdale Motherboard
TwinMOS DDR PC3200 running in dual channel mode. (2x256MB)
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro (OSC LevelIII Card)
Maxtor 7200RPM 60GB Hard Drive

System 2

Pentium4 3.0c (Default and at 3.51GHz[15x234MHz])
ABIT IS7 Springdale Motherboard
TwinMOS DDR PC3200 running in dual channel mode. (2x256MB)
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro (OSC LevelIII Card)
Maxtor 7200RPM 60GB Hard Drive

*Memory settings for both chips is 2.5/7/3/3 running 1/1 at the CPU default speeds, and with a 4/5 bus ratio when the CPU's are set to their overclocked values.

** The video card settings for both systems have been relaxed to offer the largest CPU impact possible. All settings are identical for both systems leaving the results comparable across the board.

Alright, lets get on with the benchmarks.

SiSoft Sandra 2003 (DevH Version): SiSoft Sandra is pretty much a staple in the benchmarking suite used here at Dev Hardware. It's a 3rd party synthetic benchmark that is generally well respected in the community. It offers us a quick look at several of the performance levels that otherwise would be very hard to track. That said, it IS a synthetic benchmark so should be taken as such. So is it valuable information? Yes. Is it the end all be all? No. Ok, let's look at the results.

SiSoft CPU Arithmetic Benchmark

SiSoft Multimedia Benchmark

SiSoft Memory Bandwidth Benchmark

In the above results you can see that hyper-threading made an impact on everything, sometimes minimal, sometimes not, but higher results were definitely obtained using HT.  The other thing to note here is the memory bandwidth.  The overclocked memory scores clearly illustrate the benefits of the much higher FSB the 2.6c was able to achieve over the 3.0c.

More benchmarks, overclocking, and conclusion coming at cha.....

Next: More Benchmarking >>
 

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