Intel Pentium 4 1.7 GHz – More Power For Less Money – THG.RU

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Introduction

It’s not too long ago that AMD released the Athlon 1333 processor, which was able to take over the crown for the fastest PC-microprocessor in the vast majority of benchmarks. This situation wasn’t as much of a big issue, since the previous holder of that crown had been AMD’s Athlon 1200. Intel’s Pentium 4 1.5 GHz may have a higher clock speed than both AMD processors, but its design wouldn’t let it perform particularly well in today’s applications. To make matters worse for Intel’s flagship processor, it used to come at a clearly higher price than AMD’s Athlon and it is restricted to the expensive as well as unpopular RDRAM memory. To ease this pain, Intel has so far supplied amounts of 128 or 256 MB of this memory type together with Pentium 4 processors or sponsored OEMs with $60 of the RDRAM costs. This situation will change today, as Intel is making another very significant price cut, while reducing the RDRAM-sponsoring to only $30 only for Pentium 4 processors at 1.4 GHz and more. The Pentium 4 1.3 GHz fell out of the RDRAM sponsoring program completely.

Making Pentium 4 More Popular

Rumor has it that Intel’s processor sales have plunged in the last few months, which is mainly due to problems selling Pentium 4. So besides putting tons of marketing money in TV-ads showing blue guys that build up an orange Pentium 4 logo, Intel needs to tackle the three reasons behind Pentium 4’s poor success:

• Unsatisfying Performance
• High Costs Of Processor And Platform
• Expensive And Unpopular Memory Requirement

Intel is working on all three of these problems. The release of Pentium 4 1.7 GHz should definitely ensure a reasonably well performing Pentium 4 model. The next action is significant price cuts, which will be particularly easy for Intel once the next-generation Pentium 4 (‘Northwood’ core) will be released, because it will be a shrunk (and thus cheaper to produce) version of the current ‘Willamette’ core. The long-awaited alternative to the ill-received RDRAM-memory will take longest. The second half of 2001 will hopefully see the Brookdale-chipset for Pentium 4, with SDRAM as well as DDR-SDRAM support.

The approach is as simple as it is powerful and therefore most likely successful. Even the fastest Pentium 4 processors are getting a lot cheaper and thus much more attractive. Intel can continue to hype Pentium 4 as the processor of the future, but people won’t have to pay a large premium for it anymore. AMD will have to react with price cuts as well, unless it wants to lose market share.

Pentium 4 1.7 GHz

As a technical reviewer, I am sadly lacking the ability to foretell the future, so I will stick to what I am able to do, which is checking and testing the technical features of Pentium 4 1.7 GHz. After that, I can tell you if I consider it worth its price.

The new Pentium 4 1.7 GHz processor isn’t much different to its older siblings at 1.3, 1.4 and 1.5 GHz. The looks, weight, taste and smell are identical and the silicon chip underneath the cover is also not different to previous Pentium 4 dies. The only real difference between P4 1.7 and its predecessors is its voltage of 1.75 V (P4 1.5 GHz requires 1.7 V only) and therefore its power consumption and heat production. Intel is using the good old overclocker’s trick to improve the clock speed margin and raised the core voltage a little. All other facts remain, including the fixed multiplier of Pentium 4, which makes ‘responsible overclocking’ rather difficult indeed.

If you want to learn more about the innards and previous performance evaluations of the Pentium 4 processor, I advise you to read our previous Pentium 4 articles, which are:

• Intel’s New Pentium 4 Processor
• Important Pentium 4 Evaluation Update
• Painting a New Picture of Pentium 4 – Tweaked MPEG4 Encoding
• Tom’s Blurb: Pentium 4 – Another Recount?
• Pentium 4 vs. Athlon – Final Recount

Basically, Pentium 4 is a new design, which has some problems with today’s software. Particularly office applications like Word or Excel, but also current 3D-games perform quite a bit worse on Pentium 4 than on Athlon, although the AMD-processor runs at lower clock speeds. Once software has been compiled for Pentium 4 however, the trace cache architecture is able to show its advantages. The same is valid for Pentium 4’s floating-point performance. While Pentium 4’s normal FPU lags significantly behind Athlon’s FPU, the Intel processor comes with the new SSE2-extensions, which offer very high FPU-performance for applications that are able to benefit from streaming floating point operations and that are actually programmed or at least compiled for the usage of the SSE2-extensions. In summary you could say that Pentium 4’s architecture doesn’t make it exactly a top-notch performer right now, but it could perform a lot better in the future, once applications have been optimized for this processor. High clock speeds are the best way to cover up Pentium 4’s performance problems with current software, which is why Intel was eager to release Pentium 4 1.7 GHz as soon as possible.

Test Setup

Overclocking

Due to time constraints as well as system stability considerations I did not include any test runs of overclocked Pentium 4 1.7 GHz processors. I simply dislike the fact that you have to run processor bus clock, memory clock, AGP-clock as well as PCI-clock out of spec to get Pentium 4 to higher core clock speeds. Overclocked memory, as well as out-of-spec operating AGP and PCI-buses pose a significant stability threat to an overclocked Pentium 4 system. This is a big pity, since Pentium 4 would otherwise have big potential to reach rather high core clocks. Owners of AMD’s Athlon and Duron processors are in a much better situation, because they neither have to run processor bus or system memory out of spec, nor do they need to overclock the AGP or PCI-bus to reach higher processor core clocks.

Benchmarks

Sysmark2001

BAPCo just released its new Sysmark2001, which is the successor of the well-known Sysmark2000. This evaluation software is meant to test office application performance as well as Internet content creation speed on PC systems. While Sysmark2000 was running its test applications sequentially, Sysmark2001 is now using the more realistic approach of parallel system workloads. The benchmark runs with several applications open at the same time and the simulated user switching between them, just as we do on our systems as well. BAPCo wanted to improve the real world value of its popular Sysmark evaluation software and it seems as if they did a pretty good job.

Many people expected Sysmark2001 to favorite Pentium 4, because Intel is after all an important member of BAPCo and certainly disliked the fact that Pentium 4 was so badly outscored by Athlon in the previous Sysmark2000 version. Surprisingly enough, Athlon is still well ahead of Pentium 4 in Sysmark2001 as well. Intel’s brand new Pentium 4 1.7 GHz is not even able to reach the Sysmark2001-scores of Athlon 1200.

Once we look at the details, we can see that Athlon easily outruns Pentium 4 in terms of office productivity. The Pentium 4 scores are rather sad in fact.

In terms of Internet content creation however, Pentium 4 is able to catch up and even overtake Athlon. Pentium 4 1.7 GHz is a tiny bit faster than Athlon 1333.

Sysmark2000

As Sysmark2001 is brand new, we still decided to include Sysmark2000 runs as well.

We already know this picture. Pentium 4 is not able to reach Athlon-scores. What surprises however, is the fact that in the overall score Pentium 4 lags just as much behind Athlon in the older version of Sysmark as it does in the new one. We learn that the more realistic shared-workload model of the new benchmark doesn’t seem to change the outcome one bit. Intel always claimed that Pentium 4 would be particularly good at those task-switching workloads, partly because of RDRAM-memory. We can now see that this doesn’t seem to be the case.

3D Games

Quake 3 Arena

We already know that for some surprising reasons Quake 3 Arena is the only old 3D-game that shows Pentium 4 in a particularly good light. This might be based on the fact that Intel enjoys a very close relationship with Id.

At the low resolution of 640x480x16, which makes sure that the graphics card doesn’t become the bottleneck, Pentium 4 is clearly leading the pack. Even Pentium 4 1.5 GHz is able to leave the fastest Athlon processor behind.

Once the screen resolution and color depth has reached real-world levels, the 3D-card is limiting the frame rate scores. All processors score alike.

NVIDIA’s NV15-demo is more of a processor test than the Demo001 from above. Due to the higher polygon count and the amount of lighting effects the processor has to do a lot more work. In this test Pentium 4 1.7 is beating Athlon 1333 as well, but the margin has shrunk quite a bit.

At real-world resolution Pentium 4 1.7 GHz is still able to leave the ‘unoverclocked’ Athlon fraction behind, although the differences aren’t very big anymore.

Unreal Tournament

Unreal Tournament is the first 3D-game example that does not favor Pentium 4. Here Athlon is clearly ahead of the Intel flagship processor.

The higher screen resolution doesn’t change the picture much. Athlon 1200 is already able to beat the new Pentium 4 1.7 GHz.

Evolva

This DirectX 7 game can produce quite a high workload for graphics cards as well as CPUs.

Once more Pentium 4 1.7 is not even able to reach Athlon 1200 scores. This game shows that Pentium 4 is far from being a great gamers processor with today’s games. This might finally change though.

Once bump mapping is enabled and the screen resolution is brought up to 1024x768x32, the graphics card is the limiting factor, so that all processors score alike. Keep this phenomenon in mind when you try to choose a processor for your system. At this resolution the graphics card is much more important than the processor.

Dronez

This new OpenGL game comes with all kinds of cool features. It is our benchmark for state-of-the-art 3D-performance.

You can see that this new game is definitely equipped with Pentium 4 enhancements. We will probably find this effect in a lot of new games. Pentium 4 is able to beat Athlon quite comfortably.

The higher resolution doesn’t change much. Pentium 4 is still ahead of Athlon.

MDK2

MDK2 is not one of the latest games and so it is not surprising to see Athlon’s lead ahead of the Intel processors.

The picture changes once the resolution has been increased to real-world measures. Once more the graphics card (a shabby GeForce 2 Ultra) is limiting the frame rate scores.

Mercedes Benz Truck Racing

This game is not as old as Quake 3 or MDK2, but also not exactly brand-new. The scores are distributed quite fairly. Athlon 1333 is pretty much on par with Intel’s new Pentium 4 1.7 GHz.

At 1024x768x32 the picture doesn’t change. The top-performers of the two processor makers score identical results.

3DMark2000

The beautiful 3Dmark2001 may be out for a short while already, but for processor comparisons the previous model will do just fine. We used the default benchmark run.

Pentium 4 1.7 GHz is able to beat Athlon 1333, though not by much, while Pentium 4 1.5 GHz lags a bit behind Athlon 1200.

Video2000

It’s always interesting to see how processors perform in this benchmark, which is mainly meant to test video hardware.

Pentium 4 1.7 GHz is scoring the best result here, which might be some proof for Intel’s claim that Pentium 4 is an excellent processor for video applications.

Sandra2001

I am always including these results for the ones of you who like those numbers. Personally, I don’t get much out of them.

The only benchmark that might have a deeper meaning is Sandra’s Stream memory benchmark. We see the well-known picture. The dual Rambus-channel architecture of Pentium 4’s i850 platform provides the highest results in terms of raw bandwidth.

Webmark2001 Under Windows2000

Webmark2001 is a benchmark that is supposed to give you some idea of how well a processor performs when running Internet-applications. I still don’t know what to think about the meaningfulness of this benchmark, but I supply the results anyhow.

We know from previous runs that Pentium 4 is doing better than Athlon in this benchmark, even though it still seems a bit unclear to me why. Anyway, Pentium 4 1,7 GHz is clearly leading the pack.

MPEG4 Encoding With FlasK MPEG

I personally don’t really have the time to do any MPEG4-encoding, but our editor Frank Voelkel loves it and even considers FlasK MPEG a cult program. I don’t know if I agree, but there seem to be a lot of people that are indeed using it.

Since Intel’s overnight coding of the iDCT-part of FlasK, which we had initiated last year, Pentium 4 is scoring extremely well thanks to the SSE2-optimizarions included by the Intel software engineer. Athlon doesn’t really have a chance, although AMD had also tried its best to tweak FlasK for the Athlon processor. It seems once more as if video is really what Pentium 4 is particularly good at.

Conclusion

After no less than 25 result charts the final performance evaluation of Intel’s new Pentium 4 1.7 GHz can only be “not bad, but not great either“. However, you might want to have a look at this:

This is not just a price cut, this is a big bang! Intel is cutting the Pentium 4 prices by half! Suddenly, Pentium 4 gains a whole lot of attractiveness. Admittedly, Pentium 4 1.7 GHz remains still significantly more expensive than Athlon 1333, but it has come a lot closer. Pentium 4 1.5 GHz might reach a similar street price as Athlon 1333, while Pentium 4 1.4 GHz can probably be bought for less than AMD’s flagship. Pentium 4 1.3 GHz has just become obsolete. Each time when Intel wants to drop a processor it sells it at the same price as the next better model.

We have to wait for the street prices of Pentium 4 and should not forget the added costs of the motherboard and the RDRAM memory, but it seems very likely that Pentium 4 will gain a lot of popularity now.

Is Pentium 4 1.7 GHz worth the $352 (OEM price, not street price!)? Well, as long as you predominantly use the majority of common software that favors Athlon and as long as Athlon 1333 is still quite a bit cheaper than Pentium 4 1.7 GHz, I would still go for the AMD processor. However, for speed freaks it might be worth to have a look at OEM-boxes with Pentium 4 1.7 GHz processor. They might be well in the same price range as Athlon boxes with AMD760 chipset and DDR-memory.

In summary I would say that the performance of Pentium 4 1.7 GHz might not be such a great deal, but in combination with Intel’s price drop it has become a very interesting high-end processor, especially for people who use a lot of upcoming software titles, as e.g. 3D-gamers. Intel was finally forced to come up with reasonable prices. The result will be a much higher acceptance of Pentium 4 processors. Now I am only waiting for ‘Northwood’ and ‘Brookdale’. The times for AMD will finally become harder again.