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Review: Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz Prescott, 3.4GHz Northwood and 3.4GHz Northwood Extreme Edition

by Tarinder Sandhu on 1 February 2004, 00:00

Tags: Intel (NASDAQ:INTC)

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3dMark 2001SE, Comanche 4, X²

A mixed performance bag for the Prescott and generally excellent performance for the 3.4GHz Northwood and Extreme Editions in the 2D-related benchmarks. Gaming is an area that will appeal to the Prescott's attributes, even if that damn pipeline will get in the way of absolute performance.



Just a little faster than a regular Northwood 3.2GHz but slower than the equivalent AMD CPU. The Prescott's larger L1 and L2 cache erodes the pipeline effect. Extreme Editions have always done well in 3DMark 2001SE's default test. It's of no surprise to see the 3.4GHz EE take top honours. It's positioned as a gamers' chip, after all.



Just when things were going well. The Prescott 3.2GHz CPU returns a Comanche 4 performance that's significantly below any other processor's in this lineup. It's hard to see why. Comanche 4 is a cache dependant test, something which the Prescott is well-endowed with. Suffice to say, it's not partial to Comanche's way of doing this. The 3.4GHz Northwood models do well, and the Extreme Edition chips exploit their cache advantage to the fullest.



Here the Prescott produces a Northwood-like performance. The Athlon 64s and EE chips take top honours.