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It may not be pretty, but the Prometia Mach II keeps our system at sub-zero temperatures, even when we overclocked our top-of-the-line CPU's.

that’s not necessarily a bad thing as Prescott includes a few changes that nega-tively impact performance. Prescott, for instance, uses a longer 31-stage data pipeline. The longer pipeline will make it easier to increase clock speeds, but it also slows performance. Prescott also seems to leak energy more readily than Northwood, causing it to run hotter.

The 3.4GHz Extreme Edition includes 8KB of L1 Data cache. The 512KB of L2 cache is half the size of Prescott’s 1024KB of L2, but the 2MB of on-die, full-speed L3 cache more than makes up for the smaller L2. The L3 cache helps in proces-sor-intensive applications such as gaming and video editing. Rather than the longer, slower 31-stage pipeline, the 3.4GHz Extreme Edition uses a 20-stage pipeline.

Although it’s based on Northwood, the 3.4GHz Extreme Edition’s 102.9W power dissipation is more similar to Prescott’s

103W power dissipation than high-end Northwood P4’s 82W power dissipation.

Despite the higher power dissipation, the 3.4GHz Extreme Edition has the same 1.525V to 1.6V operating voltage as a standard 3.4GHz Northwood. This is higher than the 1.25V to 1.4V operating voltage for Prescott processors. Our ver-sion of the 3.4GHz Extreme Edition uses Intel’s basic Socket 478 interface. At press time, however, Intel had announced a new 3.4GHz Extreme Edition and a new 3.6GHz Prescott that uses an LGA moth-erboard interface. Given more time, we would’ve loved to take one or both proces-sors for a spin, but announcements were made much too close to press time.

Furthermore, the 3.4GHz Extreme Edition proved itself in earlier testing, reaching speeds of 3.85GHz. We also man-aged some exceptional benchmark scores, depending on which motherboard we paired the processor with.

Speaking of moth-erboards, a high-end processor demands a high-end mother-board.

We decided on using Chaintech’s 9CJS Zenith, as it too proved itself in earlier testing by providing solid perfor-mance scores and good overclocking options. We managed to get a 3.2GHz Extreme Edition processor running at 3.65GHz on the same board and posted consis-tently high benchmark scores.

The Zenith board includes Intel’s 875P chipset on the north-bridge. The 875P includes support for an 800MHz FSB and dual-channel PC3200 DDR SDRAM.

The Chaintech board includes an Intel ICH5R on the south-bridge, which means support for SATA

RAID 0 or 1. We’ll be sticking with straight-up SATA hard drive configura-tion in this article, however, and leave RAID for another day.

Chaintech includes a number of nice extras with its Zenith board, including integrated 7.1 surround-sound audio and Gigabit Ethernet. The CBOX3 comes with the Zenith board and mounts in an external 5.25-inch drive bay.

The CBOX3 includes front USB and FireWire ports along with a 6-in-1 card reader for removable media such as SD and Memory Stick. The board also includes the Handigator remote control.

Both the Handigator and CBOX3 are nice features, but we didn’t mess with either as they added nothing to the moth-erboard’s performance.

We did keep our test system components as similar as possible with the exception of our system memory. With the new Socket 939 Athlon 64s still too new to procure, we had no choice but to use registered DDR SDRAM in our Athlon 64 FX-53 test sys-tem. We saw no need to handicap our Extreme Edition because of AMD’s memo-ry restrictions, and used unbuffered DDR SDRAM on our Intel test system.

Overclocking. Headquartered in the Midwest, below zero temperatures are noth-ing new to us. In fact, we had a habit of huddling around Athlon XP processors for heat back in the day. What we’re not used to, however, is having a processor that’s colder than a February morning. We strapped the motherboard, processor, and memory into our Mach II enabled chassis, connected the Mach II to the processor using the Prometeia Intel Easy Mod Kit, attached our drives and cards, and then got ready to crank up the voltage.

Before we overclocked to 11, we had to play scientist and record some default scores. Considering our motherboard and processor had both proven them-selves previously, we were fairly confi-dent we’d start out with some strong default scores. The 3.4GHz Extreme Edition didn’t disappoint, managing a 6750 3Dmark03 score at its default 3.4GHz clock speed. The score was well above the Athlon 64 FX-53’s 6302 default 3Dmark03 score, but still about Processor, Motherboard & Drivers: AMD System

Processor AMD Athlon 64 FX-53

Motherboard ASUS SK8V

BIOS Manufacturer American Megatrends

BIOS Version AMI Bios 2003

(Asus Version 1002) Chipset Driver VIA 4.51 (K8T800)

Common Components

RAM Corsair PC2700 registered

DDR SDRAM (2 x 1GB)

Video Gainward PowerPack! Ultra/

1800 XP Golden Sample (GeForce FX 5950 Ultra)

Hard Drive 80GB Western Digital WD800JD 7,200rpm SATA

Mod Kit Prometia AMD 64 EasyMod Kit

Phase Change Cooler Prometia Mach II

CD-ROM LiteOn Black 48X/24X/48X/16X

DVD/CD-RW

Floppy Samsung 1.44MB

Power Supply Antec 430W TruePower

Case Antec PLUS1080AMG

Temperature Monitor MacPower Digital Doc 5

69 points less than the Athlon’s over-clocked 3Dmark03 score.

PCMark04 scores were equally strong. In fact, all of our PCMark04 default scores except for the HDD score were better than the Athlon 64 FX-53 highest overclocked scores. At 5700, the Overall PCMark04 score was more than 900 points better than the Athlon 64 FX-53’s default PCMark04 Overall score and almost 400 points bet-ter than the best PCMark04 score. The 3.4GHz P4’s 5330 CPU score was 862 points better than the Athlon 64 FX-53’s default CPU score and 186 points better than Athlon 64’s overclocked CPU score.

One reason we choose the Chaintech 9CJS Zenith board is because it seems to provide some excellent PCMark04 Memory scores.

The Extreme Edition’s 5496 Memory score was significantly better than the FX-53’s 4859 default Memory score and slight-ly better than the FX-53’s 5333 overclocked Memory score. Paired with our NVIDIA graphics card, the 3.4GHz Extreme Edition managed an impressive 5706 Graphics score that eclipsed both the FX-53’s default 5288 Graphics score and its 5467 overclocked Graphics score. When it came to HDD per-formance, however, the FX-53’s 4766 was almost 300 points better than the 4373 posted by Intel’s 3.4GHz Extreme Edition.

We were able to easily increase the FSB to 210MHz, but this caused a slight perfor-mance setback as our 3Dmark03 score fell slightly to 6728. Our system rebooted when we tried to increase the FSB to 220MHz, so we scaled it back to 215MHz. At 3.71GHz, our processor rebounded nicely with a 6847 3Dmark03 score. We were able to increase the FSB to 216MHz without any prob-lems and a very slight 6-point 3Dmark03 increase. We were able to increase our 3Dmark03 score another 16 points to 6869 by increasing the FSB to 217MHz.

We began to have problems as we increased the processor’s clock speed to 3.76GHz and FSB to 218MHz. At this speed, 3Dmark03 failed to complete suc-cessfully. Increasing the FSB to 1.6V, how-ever, managed to fix our stability problems and we posted a 6776 3Dmark03 score.

Our celebration was short lived as our benchmarks failed at 219MHz. We had to increase the CPU voltage to 1.65V in order

to get the system stable. Our 3.77GHz processor yielded a 6884 3Dmark03 score.

We were able to push the processor’s clock speed to 3.79GHz by increasing the FSB to 220MHz, but the 3Dmark03 score fell slightly to 6871. Attempts to further over-clock the system were unsuccessful.

The Extreme Edition system yielded its best score at 3.77GHz, so we reset the FSB to 219MHz and ran PCMark04. The Intel system was already dominating the AMD system before we even started the overclocking, and increasing our system’s speed just seemed to pile it on. Our PCMark04 Overall score rose 395 points to 6095 and the CPU score increased to 5817. We saw a hefty gain in our Mem-ory score as it rose to 6023, while our Graphics score showed a modest increase to 5720. The only PCMark04 score to lag behind the AMD system

was the 4347 HDD score.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, this con-test was over even before it had really begun. Our 3.4GHz Pentium 4 had managed to beat the best overclock scores the Athlon 64 FX-53 could muster. In fact, we had managed to top the Athlon 64 FX-53’s refrigerator-assisted scores with simple aircooling previously in this issue. Although the Extreme Edition captured the performance crown, AMD showed the biggest increase in performance.

We were able to increase the FX-53 400MHz from 2.4GHz to 2.8GHz, and the extra 400MHz bought us an extra 379 points in 3Dmark03.

We weren’t actually able to push the Intel processor quite as far, perhaps partly due to Intel’s locked multi-plier. The Extreme Edition was only able to gain an extra 370MHz, and

3Dmark03 improvements were a measly 121 points. Of course, the Extreme Edition started out with a default 3Dmark03 score that was 69 points higher than the FX-53’s overclocked 3Dmark03 score.

As we’ve seen, however, the chipset plays as important a part in the system’s overall performance as the processor itself. Socket 940 pickings are a little scarcer than Socket 478 options. The Extreme Edition certainly owes a great deal of its success to the 875P-based Chaintech 9CJS Zenith mother-board. From a price/performance stand-point, however, AMD may well be ahead of Intel. AMD’s 940-pin FX-53 costs about

$800, while Intel’s Socket 478 3.4GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition costs nearly

$200 more.

by Joshua Gulick and Chad Denton

Processor, Motherboard & Drivers: Intel System

Processor 3.4GHz Pentium 4

Extreme Edition Motherboard Chaintech 9CJS Zenith BIOS Manufacturer Phoenix Award BIOS

BIOS Version Ver 6

Chipset Driver 5.0.2.1002

Common Components

RAM 1GB PC4000 DDR SDRAM

(4 x 512MB)

Video Gainward PowerPack! Ultra/

1800 XP Golden Sample (GeForce FX 5950 Ultra)

Hard Drive 80GB Western Digital WD800JD 7,200rpm SATA

Mod Kit Prometeia Intel CPU EasyMod Kit Phase Change Cooler Prometeia Mach II

CD-ROM LiteOn Black 48X/24X/48X/16X

DVD/CD-RW

Floppy Samsung 1.44MB

Power Supply Antec 430W TruePower

Case Antec PLUS1080AMG

Temperature Monitor MacPower Digital Doc 5

In this category, we had no obvious winners, but the Radeon 9800SE from Sapphire stood for lackluster performance.

In 3Dmark2001SE and 3Dmark03 tests, the Radeon 9800SE turned out scores of 13611 and 3315. That’s 3536 and 2103 marks slower than the next slowest card, the ASUS GeForce FX 5900. Throughout our AquaMark3 tests, the Radeon 9800SE consistently showed scores that were much lower than what the GeForce FX 5900 produced. For instance, the average default score in AquaMark3 for the GeForce FX 5900 was about 38517. The Radeon 9800SE was 13843 marks lower at 24674.

The 9800SE produced similar results across the board, including scores of 11.11 in Halo at a 1,600 x 1,200 resolu-tion. In the UT2003 Anatalus and Phobos2 tests, the card showed frame rates of 37.1 and 51 at a resolution of 1,600 x 1,200, which are average to say the least, especially in this competition.

The rest of the cards were well-matched at their core clock speeds. All three NVIDIA cards have higher clock speeds (475MHz, 450MHz, and 400MHz) than the ATI cards (412Mhz, 380MHz, and 325MHz), but in the benchmarking com-petition, the NVIDIA cards failed to take a clear lead. In fact, if any card had an edge over the others, it was ATI’s Radeon 9800XT, which uses a default core clock speed of 412MHz and an effective mem-ory clock of 730MHz but scored 1000 marks higher at 45864 in AquaMark3 tests than the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra.

The Radeon 9800XT also outper-formed the other cards in 3Dmark2001SE and 3Dmark03 tests, scoring 20354 and 6521, respectively. In the same tests, the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, the fastest of the NVIDIA cards, scored 18475 and 6214.

The Radeon 9800 Pro, with default core clock and memory clock speeds that Our battery of tests ran through

Aqua-Mark3, Halo, 3Dmark2001SE, 3Dmark03 (using Futuremark’s 340 patch), Quake III Arena, Unreal Tournament 2003, and our timedemo created in Unreal Tournament 2004. Quake III tests were run at resolu-tions of 1,024 x 768 and 1,600 x 1,200 and AquaMark3 tests were run at the program’s default resolution, 1,024 x 768. Halo tests were conducted at 1,600 x 1,200 with and without AA/AF at full.

You may wonder why we set up a graphics card challenge between ATI and NVIDIA without ATI’s X800 XT or NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 Ultra. Well, it’s because neither was available at retail at the time of this writing. They will be by the time you read this, so watch for com-parisons later on.

Equally regrettable is that our results were not as definitive as we had hoped for; that’s to say, none of the six cards we selected emerged as a clear winner, so it would be unfair to suggest that our com-parison will put an end to the ATI vs.

NVIDIA debate. On the contrary, it may be like putting out fire with gasoline.

The Fast And The Not So-Furious Let’s get straight to what matters most:

speed. Behind reliability and API support, speed is probably the most important factor users consider when purchasing a new card.

ATI & NVIDIA