One of the Pentium 4's fortes is its strong streaming media performance, such as audio and video encoding and decoding. These are traditionally very memory bandwidth-intensive tasks, and so we would expect some degree of reliance on high performance memory in order to achieve proper performance scaling. To test this, we measured the time required to encode a 90MB WAV file to MP3 format at a sampling rate of 190kbps.

For the most part, all three DDR platforms performed equally well, while the SDR platform lagged noticeably behind. It can be seen that as the CPU speed increased above 1.8 - 2.0 GHz, the SDR platform began to scale poorly due to a lack of memory bandwidth. We did, however, expect more separation between the DDR266 and DDR333 platforms. It is possible that another factor was inhibiting performance (perhaps a hard disk?).