Intel Introduces 533MHz FSB CPUs - Pentium 4 2.53GHz

Internet Content Creation & General Usage Performance

With this review we continue to use SYSMark 2002; SYSMark 2002 can be considered to be a much more memory bandwidth intensive version of the Winstone tests. The benchmark is split into two parts, Internet Content Creation which deals with content creation applications (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc...) and Office Productivity which is more general usage oriented (Word, Excel, Netscape, Anti-Virus, etc...).

The 2002 update changes things around a bit; first of all the benchmark's total scores are arrived at differently than in the 2001 benchmark. Windows Media Encoder no longer accounts for close to half of the Internet Content Creation test, rather only about 10%. There is also no need for a special Athlon XP SSE patch as the 2002 suite uses a version of the encoding dll that properly detects SSE support on all Palomino cores as well as Pentium 4 cores.

The rest of the benchmark is much more evenly distributed and it is much more memory bandwidth intensive than the old benchmark. The Internet Content Creation tests on average use about 600MB/s of bandwidth vs 300MB in SYSMark 2001. The Office Productivity tests are still stuck at around 580MB/s of memory bandwidth.

For more information on the tests and the applications used consult this whitepaper provided by BAPCo.

Internet Content Creation Performance Internet Content Creation SYSMark 2002 Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz Intel Pentium 4B 2.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.0A GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) 330 316 310 292 279 240 225 224 218 208 206 195 | 0 | 66 | 132 | 198 | 264 | 330 | 396

While the faster FSB doesn't really help all that much in either of the SYSMark tests, the Pentium 4 doesn't really need it as it has always been favored in these benchmarks. Here the lead is simply extended by the 2.53GHz part.

General Usage Performance Office Productivity SYSMark 2002 Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz Intel Pentium 4B 2.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.0A GHz AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz 178 169 168 165 158 153 150 144 141 138 136 125 | 0 | 36 | 71 | 107 | 142 | 178 | 214

The race is much closer in the office productivity tests, remember that a greater than 10% margin is usually required for the end user to notice any performance differences as significant.