A big, greasy caveat
Some of the numbers you're about to see below are a little funky. Actually, the numbers are fine, but I've kind of forced them into our scheme, so I'd best explain myself. You see, I've graphed some of the benchmark results with line graphs, as we have done in our graphics card reviews in the past. The idea in doing so is to show CPU scaling at different clock speeds and with different processor revisions. For the Intel chips, I have two groups, the older Pentium 4 chips with 533MHz front-side busses, and the new ones with the 800MHz bus. I've matched up the Athlon XP's model numbers to the Pentium 4's clock speeds for the sake of comparison, too, so we have three series on each line graph.

One of those series, though, includes a couple of P4 chips that don't quite line up. For the "2600" speed/model number, I've included the P4 2.53GHz, and for the "3000" speed/model number, I've included the P4 3.06GHz. In both cases, these chips are 66MHz off the expected speed—the slower one is under, and the fast over. As a result, the blue line on our CPU scaling graphs, which represents 533MHz-bus Pentium 4 chips, tends to tilt a little more than it should in a perfect comparative scenario. Keep that in mind when you're looking at how these older P4 chips scale with clock speed.

Our testing methods
As ever, we did our best to deliver clean benchmark numbers. Tests were run at least twice, and the results were averaged.

Our test systems were configured like so:

All tests on the Pentium 4 'C', 3.0GHz, 3.06GHz, and 3.2GHz systems were run with Hyper-Threading enabled. The other Pentium 4 chips tested here don't support Hyper-Threading.

Thanks to Corsair for providing us with memory for our testing. If you're looking to tweak out your system to the max and maybe overclock it a little, Corsair's RAM is definitely worth considering.

The test systems' Windows desktops were set at 1024x768 in 32-bit color at an 85Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

• Cachemem 2.65MMX
• SiSoft Sandra Standard 2003 (2003.3.9.44)
• Compiled binary of C Linpack port from Ace's Hardware
• ZD Media Business Winstone 2002 1.0.1
• ZD Media Content Creation Winstone 2002 1.0.1
• Cinebench 2003
• Sphinx 3.3
• LAME 3.92
• Xmpeg 4.5 with DivX Video 5.03
• FutureMark 3DMark03
• Unreal Tournament 2003 demo benchmark
• Comanche 4 demo benchmark
• Quake III Arena v1.31
• Serious Sam SE v1.07
• SPECviewperf 7.1

All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.