Pentium 4 3.06 GHz Reviews

Intel’s Pentium 4 3.06 GHz processor finally makes yperThreading a reality for the desktop PC. With this technology, your processor will appear like two separate CPUs to your OS. The current version of HyperThreading technology allows a maximum of two threads to be dispatched to the CPU. Everything else has still stayed the same. So really how good is the processor? To answer this question, we tested the Pentium 4 3.06 GHz on a machine based on an Intel D845PEBT2 motherboard with 256 MB of DDR RAM, an ATi Radeon 9700 Pro graphics card and a Seagate Barracuda 7,200-rpm ATA IV 40 GB hard disk drive, running Windows XP Professional. The hard drive was clean formatted before installing the OS and all the necessary driver updates and patches were applied before running any benchmark. Our first tests included synthetic benchmarks. Here we ran SiSoft Sandra Profes-sional 2003 and noted the scores in different areas. In the CPU benchmark that indicates the theoretical performance potential of the CPU, the Pen-tium 4 3.06 GHz scored 9059 CPU Drystone marks and 5567 Whetstone marks. The CPU multimedia sub-test is a real-life benchmark rather than a synthetic one and is designed to show the improvements that instruction sets used in various processors (MMX/Enhanced, 3DNow! /Enhanced, and SSE (2)) bring to such an algorithm. We also ran the
Memory bench-mark, which meas-ures sustained memory band-width. Here the P4 3.06 GHz easily outperformed the 2.8 GHz-based processor even with HyperThreading turned off. In the CPU multimedia subtest too, the HyperThread-ing -enabled CPU posted a higher score in the FPU SSE region though the integer scores don’t offer much to talk about. To test the gaming per-formance of the processor, we ran a time demo on the retail version of Quake III Arena
patched with version 1.30. The test was run in three different settings: normal, high and max (1024x786x32x32). In the normal mode there was no difference in the scores with HyperThreading switched on and off, but the difference was noticeable in the high and max quality modes.
Our second gaming test involved running Comanche 4 in three different settings, nor-mal (640x480x16), high (800x600x16) and maximum (1024x786x32). Here too there wasn’t much difference in the frame rates with HyperThread-ing turned on and off. Another area where a high amount of CPU power is required is video encoding. To measure the performance of a processor during video encod-ing, we encoded a standard MPEG-2 format video sequence using VirtualDub v1.4. The DivX codec used was v4.02 and the setting for audio
and video processing in Virtu-alDub was turned to full pro-cessing mode. The video om-pression bit rate was set at 900 Kbps. Here the less time it takes to encode the file, the better it is. We recorded our lowest ever score—the CPU took a mere 51 seconds to encode the video file.
This makes the P4 3.06 a great option for those who work with video encoding pplica-tions to a large extent. Just to put the CPU under a bit more stress, we ran a cou-ple of benchmarks simultane-ously. We ran the Povray benchmark, which is severely CPU intensive, while simulta-neously running Comanche 4 in the normal mode. We ran this test first with Hyper-Threading turned off and then with HyperThreading turned on just to see if it makes a dif-ference—we achieved an aver-age 26.57 fps with the Hyper-Threading disabled and a boost of approximately 11 fps with it enabled. All in all, Intel’s latest desk-top processor truly presses with its performance and the HyperThreading feature makes it achieve higher performance scores under stress. Hyper-Threading in its future iterations could very well overcome its lit-tle drawbacks that still exist—for instance, it could reduce performance if the OS dispatches ultiple
threads that are aimed at similar resources in the CPU. Until then this is as fast as you could get.
SPECIFICATIONS:
0.13 micron fabrication, 478 pins, 533 MHz FSB bus, Hyper-Threading