Test notes
Regular readers may recall our recent review of the Athlon 64 3000+, which included benchmarks for lots of different processors at various speed grades, including some very fresh results for a number of new chips. We threw those out for this review, and started over with a clean slate. This time out, we have new drivers, new BIOSes, and new revisions for many of our test applications. Also, we're now using ATI Radeon 9800 Pro graphics cards in our test systems. As a result, the benchmark scores from the previous reviews will not be directly comparable to our results here. Not to worry, though: we've tested plenty of speed grades and CPU types.

We tested all the Pentium 4 chips with Hyper-Threading enabled. To make things even more interesting, we tested the Prescott and Northwood Pentium 4s with Hyper-Threading turned off, to better understand the relative benefits of Prescott's improved Hyper-Threading implementation.

Also, in order to obtain the results for a Northwood Pentium 4 running at 3.4GHz, we used the handy-dandy BIOS option on our Abit IC7-G motherboard to disable the L3 cache on our 3.4GHz Extreme Edition processor. The Extreme Edition, of course, is just a Northwood with a 2MB L3 cache. By all appearances, with its L3 cache disabled, the chip performs exactly as one would expect a Pentium 4 3.4GHz chip to perform.

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 systems were run with Hyper-Threading enabled, except where otherwise noted.

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 1152x864 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 2004 (9.89)
• Compiled binary of C Linpack port from Ace's Hardware
• Discreet 3ds max 5.1 SP1
• NewTek Lightwave 7.5
• Cinebench 2003
• POV-Ray for Windows v3.5
• PICCOLOR v4.0 build 472
• SPECviewperf 7.1.1
• ScienceMark 2.0 beta (23SEP03 build)
• Sphinx 3.3
• LAME 3.95.1 (build from mitiok.cjb.net)
• Xmpeg 5.0.3 with DivX Video 5.11
• FutureMark 3DMark03 build 340
• Comanche 4 demo
• Quake III Arena v1.31
• Serious Sam SE v1.07
• Splinter Cell v1.2
• Unreal Tournament 2003 demo v.2206
• Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory v2.55

The tests and methods we employ are generally publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.