Testbed and Methods

During this test session we will compare the performance of the new Pentium 4 670 processor against that of the top single- and dual-core solutions targeted for the same market segment. So, Intel Pentium 4 670 will be competing today against Athlon 64, Athlon 64 FX, Athlon 64 X2, Pentium 4, Pentium 4 Extreme Edition and Pentium Extreme Edition processors.

We assembled a few systems for our tests from the following components:

• CPU:
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (Socket 939, 2.4GHz, 2 x 1024KB L2, E6 core revision aka Toledo);
• AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 (Socket 939, 2.6GHz, 1024KB L2, CG core revision aka Clawhammer);
• AMD Athlon 64 4000+ (Socket 939, 2.4GHz, 1024KB L2, CG core revision aka Clawhammer);
• AMD Athlon 64 3800+ (Socket 939, 2.4GHz, 512KB L2, E3 core revision aka Venice);
• Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 840 (LGA775, 3.2GHz, 2 x 1MB L2);
• Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz (LGA775, 3.73GHz, 2MB L2);
• Intel Pentium 4 670 (LGA775, 3.6GHz, 2MB L2);
• Intel Pentium 4 660 (LGA775, 3.6GHz, 2MB L2);
• Intel Pentium 4 570 (LGA775, 3.8GHz, 1MB L2);
• Mainboards:
• ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe (Socket 939, NVIDIA nForce4 SLI);
• ASUS P5ND2-SLI Deluxe (LGA775, nForce4 SLI (Intel Edition)).
• Memory:
• 1024MB DDR400 SDRAM (Corsair CMX512-3200XLPRO, 2 x 512MB, 2-2-2-10);
• 1024MB DDR2-667 SDRAM (Corsair CM2X512A-5400UL, 2 x 512MB, 4-4-4-14).
• PowerColor RADEON X800 XT (PCI-E x16) graphics card.
• Maxtor MaXLine III 250GB (SATA150) HDD.
• Microsoft Windows XP SP2.