When we look at the entire spread of benchmark readings we took here for you today, we see the P4 pulling down six wins to the Athlon 64's five wins, with two virtual draws in the 3DMark05 and Lame MP3 tests. These metrics should be contrasted by the fact that the benchmarks that were won by the Athlons were more mainstream desktop and gaming applications that many of our readership finds most important. The P4 definitely excels in audio and video media encoding, as well as mutlithreaded applications like Cinema 4D in our Cinebench benchmarks. The Athlons were the clear and distinct victors everywhere else. Finally, we noted a smallish 1 – 3% advantage for the new 3.46GHz P4 Extreme Edition and i925XE chipset, versus the current standard P4 EE and the i925X.
The new 3.46GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition coupled with the i925XE chipset offers a small performance gain for the enthusiast in certain gaming scenarios and the occasional Media Encoding or 3D Rendering workload. Again, the performance gains we observed were in the 1 – 3% range, hardly what we expected frankly. In fact, equal performance gains can be realized just by making the move to lower latency DDR2 DRAM set at CAS 3, 3, 3, 8 timings. With identical system memory timings in our i925X and i925XE systems, the net gain from a high-speed 1066MHz FSB is observable but frankly nothing to write home about, at least in the applications we tested it in.
for AMD.
