Quake III Arena

The P4 3.2GHz shatters the 400 fps barrier in Quake III Arena, and all but one of the Pentium 4 chips beat out the Athlon XP 3200+.

3DMark03

3DMark03 is obviously bound by graphics card performance more than anything else. The P4 3.2GHz is fastest here, but by a mighty narrow margin.

The pack separates nicely in 3DMark03's CPU tests, as one might hope. When that happens, the Pentium 4 processors come out on top of the AMD chips—but only with the faster 800MHz bus.

Serious Sam SE

After months of humiliation at the hands of the Athlon XP in Serious Sam SE, the Pentium 4 3.2GHz finally manages to take the top spot here. This one used to be the Athlon XP's home turf, but no more.