Memory performance

At 3.57GHz, our Pentium 4 520's overclocked front-side bus yields impressive memory bandwidth, especially in Cachemem.

Our overclocked chip closely mirrors the Linpack performance of the Pentium 3 560 3.6GHz, which looks about right considering that the chips are clocked within 30MHz of each other. Let's clear out some of the results and take a closer look at how our overclock helps the Pentium 4 520's performance.

Now there's a nice jump. Notice how our overclocked chip is not only faster with smaller matrix sizes that fit within the processor's L1 and L2 caches, but also with larger matrices that overflow into main memory.

Despite running its memory with more relaxed memory timings, our Pentium 4 520 at 3.57GHz scores well in Cachemem's latency tests. Lower memory latencies can be achieved through tighter timings, higher memory clock speeds, or both. Based on our Cachemem latency results, it's clear that the 3.57GHz chip's overclocked memory and faster bus more than make up for its more relaxed memory timings.