Intel Pentium 4 3.0C – The First 800MHz FSB CPU

Final Words

As we expected, the 800MHz FSB improves overall performance between 0 and 12% as you can see by this chart:

Benefit of 800MHz FSB Performance Improvement of 800MHz over 533MHz FSB Content Creation Winstone 2003 Busines Winstone 2002 Unreal Tournament 2003 (Flyby) Unreal Tournament 2003 (Botmatch) Quake III Arena Jedi Knight 2 Comanche 4 MPEG4 Encoding SPECviewperf - 3dsmax01 SPECviewperf - drv08 SPECviewperf - dx07 SPECviewperf - light05 SPECviewperf - proe01 SPECviewperf - ugs01 0.0% 1.6% 4.7% 5.8% 7.3% 8.3% 2.5% 6.1% 5.0% 11.6% 6.1% 7.9% 9.4% 0.0% | 0 | 2 | 5 | 7 | 9 | 12 | 14

Combine the improvement of the 800MHz FSB with the benefits of Hyper Threading and you've got some relatively tempting performance improvements to the Pentium 4, but it's nothing that's going to blow you away. The true benefits of both the 800MHz FSB and Hyper Threading will be realized with Prescott later this year as the processor will push higher frequencies and contain Hyper Threading specific architectural improvements that should improve performance even more.

The introduction of new platforms, the 800MHz FSB and Hyper Threading into the mainstream won't replace the need for higher clocked processors in order to remain competitive, but until AMD can respond with faster Athlon XPs and eventually with the Athlon 64, Intel will be just fine with their new C line of Pentium 4 processors.