Office and Content Creation Applications

As we see, in Business Winstone 2003 it is not only data transfer rate between the CPU and the memory that matters: low latency is also of great importance. This is actually why i845PE showed pretty high result here. As we have already said above, when we set the FSB to 200MHz in the i845PE based system, its latency gets very low.

Content Creation Winstone 2003 offers us a slightly different picture. However, Pentium 4 with 800MHz bus manages to show better results than Pentium 4 3.06GHz CPU with 533MHz bus frequency. Although the performance gap between them is not that big: about 2% only. The thing is that applications included into this test package use the memory bus quite actively but at the same time require high actual CPU performance.

Now let’s take a look at the streaming data encoding tasks, which are exactly the tasks where faster bus should play the main role.

And it is absolutely true! As soon as the system acquires 800MHz bus and dual-channel DDR400 SDRAM, the performance boosts significantly. For example, data compression with WinRAR utility gets over 20% faster. By the way, we can also see that the use of 800MHz bus with i845PE chipset doesn’t provide the same advantage any more. Unfortunately, this chipset is a single-channel one and hence the memory bus appears a noticeable bottleneck.

And the fastness of files encoding into MP3 format hardly depends on the memory subsystem performance, as we may see. That is why, just like in CPU benchmark from PCMark2002, Pentium 4 3.06GHz processor outperforms Pentium 4 3.0GHz CPU even despite the slower bus of the former.

When we encode into MPEG-4 format, the picture is totally different. Although the processor speed here is as important as during MP3 encoding, the systems with 800MHz bus are slightly faster than the same systems with 533MHz bus. Also the PAT technology implemented in i875 ensures a certain advantage here.

We see almost the same thing with Windows Media Encoder. By the way, we would like to stress that the new Pentium 4 processors manage to beat AMD Athlon XP 3000+ in all data encoding tasks. Intel CPUs owe this victory to the gigantic Pentium 4 bandwidth as well as to Hyper-Threading technology, which allows using the CPU resources in a much more efficient way.