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| Shootout above 2 GHz Northwood vs. Willamette vs. Athlon XP | |
| (Review by MS, January 7, 2002) |
Test Setup
Originally, I was going to use the Intel D845BG (i845D) board but in the last minute, the ASUS P4B266 arrived here. Since the ASUS board allows memory tweaks to optimize the performance and, on average, scored higher than the original Intel board, it appears fair to use this board since the AMD Athlon XP 2000+ was used on a production retail board as well which allowed similar setup optimizations.
There would have been other platforms to use in this roundup like the VIA P4X266, the SIS-645 or even the other Intel platforms like the SDRAM version of the i845 (now wouldn't that have been fun) or the i850 Dual-Channel Rambus platform. In all honesty, I feel that the two latter will disappear very rapidly in the near future. Further, as a matter of professional courtesy to Intel and to keep the amount of data somewhat manageable, it appeared best to stick with a high-end i845 board because those are the ones that will occupy a large portion of the market.
| Intel P4 Northwood 2.2 GHz | Intel P4 Northwood 2.0 GHz | Intel P4 Willamette 2.0 GHz | AMD Athlon XP2000+ (1667 MHz) |
| ASUS A7V266-E | |||
Common Hardware
In all benchmarks run with any P4, the Intel Application Accelerator was installed.
Initial Observations: A SpeedBug in Windows98?
A small thing on the side: It is true that Windows98 first edition is becoming somewhat obsolete. Still, there are enough users that are still clinging on to it. As it turned out, there was no way to get Win98 to work at 2.2 GHz. Windows98SE had no problem at the higher speed, though. Even a Win98 (first ed.) system working flawlessly with the 2.0 GHz Northwood would not boot in to Windows after switching to the 2.2 GHz version. Even though we observed this in three different installations using the original Intel D845BG, the MSI 845Ultra and the ASUS P4B266, this may not be a feature of Win98. On the other hand, it could be a repetition of the 350 MHz speed bug in Win95.
New CPU drivers in WinXP?
Whenever switching between Willamette and Northwood Core, WindowsXP became really desparate to find and install new CPU drivers, unfortunately, not very successfully. This happened either way but there was no difference in the benchmark results.
next page: => Synthetic Scores =>
