Review: The Need for Speed: 3GHz and counting

Here's a quick rundown of the test system should you wish to compare benchmark results with your own.

• Intel Pentium4 2266MHz S478 Northwood CPU Northwood B @ 2.26GHz & 3GHz.
• ABIT IT7-MAX I845E motherboard
• AMD Athlon XP2100 (1733MHz) Socket A CPU
• MSI KT3 Ultra2-BR KT333 motherboard

Common components

• ABIT GeForce4 Ti 4200 64MB at stock speeds (250/500)
• 256MB Samsung PC2700 run at strictest timings (2-5-2-2)
• 120GB Western Digital 120JB 7200rpm hard drive with 8MB cache.
• Liteon 40x12x40 CDRW
• Pioneer DVR-104 DVD ReWriter
• Liteon 16x DVD
• Samcheer 420w PSU
• 21" Sony G500 FD monitor
• D-Link FE530TX NIC
• Lian-Li PC60 Aluminium Case

Software

• Windows XP Professional Build 2600.xpclient.010817-1148
• Detonator XP 29.42 drivers
• Sisoft Sandra 2002 Professional
• Pifast v41
• Lame v3.92 MP3 encoding with Razor-Lame 1.15 front-end
• XMpeg 4.2A DVD encoding, DivX 5.02 CODEC
• 3DMark 2001SE
• Comanche 4 benchmark
• Serious Sam 2 Demo
• Quake 3 v1.30

The benchmarks used should give us an indication of what to expect from faster P4s in the near future. It's no secret that Intel plan to launch the 2.66GHz and 2.80GHz NW P4 shortly. We may well see a 3.06GHz P4 this year, too.

I'll also include comparative benchmarks from a Athlon XP2100 processor running with asynchronous memory on a MSI KT333-based motherboard. This should give you some idea of where the competition stands.

All benchmarks were conducted at 1024x768x32 100Hz with vertical sync' disabled. Benchmarks were run 3 times consecutively, an average score was taken. The systems was configured for maximum performance.

Let's trundle over to the numbers.