The Pentium 4 is meant to do exceptionally well with multimedia applications and games as its high-bandwidth, low latency architecture is meant to perform well under these conditions. Therefore it is worthwhile to investigate whether the extra bandwidth offered by PC-1066 and PC-1200 really adds to the Pentium 4’s performance. Therefore we’ll be using the same configurations a used in our ’i845, Performance Bottlenecks’ article, so we can also compare the PC-1066 and PC-1200 scores to that of the i845 platform.

System Configuration

• CPU: Intel Pentium 4 2.0 GHz Socket-478
• Motherboards: Asus P4T-E, i850 chipset, Socket-478
• Memory: Samsung 2x 128MB PC-1066 RDRAM
• Videocard: Elsa Gladiac 920, GeForce3 64Mb
• Harddisk: Western Digital Caviar WD800BB 80GB, 7200RPM
• CDROM: Toshiba SD-M1212 6x DVD/32x CDROM
• Floppy: Generic 1.44 MB
• Case: Generic Midi-ATX
• Powersupply: Delta 300 Watts Intel-P4-Approved

Software Configuration

• OS: Microsoft Windows 2000 Pro, SP2
• Disk Configuration: NTFS, four 20GB partitions
• Resolution/Colordepth: 1024x76/16-bits
• Driver video: Detonator 4, v20.81
• DirectX: DirectX v8.0a
• Busmaster: Intel v6.31.00

The Asus P4T-E features the new 478-pin socket for Intel's Pentium 4 and was equipped with an Intel Retail Boxed heatsink which was used throughout our testing. All tests were run a minimum of three times and the results were averaged as to cancel out any highs and lows, this in order to get an accurate representation of real-world performance.