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LOSTCIRCUITS	SHORTCUTS: Willy, Woody and Scotty Coolers R'Us Enhanced Power Management Specs and Names testConfiguration NX vs. DX Memory Bandwidth Latencies WorldBench5 -1 WorldBench5 -2 3dsmax More 3D Rendering Cinebench2003 Gaming FutureMarks Conclusions Give Us Some Feedback on this Review
Intel Pentium4 600 Series
(Review by MS February 21, 2005)

Memory Bandwidth

With the migration to the 1066MHz PSB, Intel finally opened up the pipes to go beyond the 6.4 GB/sec limitation by the CPU interface. The new ceiling is at 8.5GB/sec, however, as we showed earlier, depending on the CPU used, other "internal" limitations are in place preventing the system from taking advantage of the bandwidth. We also showed that cranking up the bus speed on a P4-560 partially solves this problem, however, benchmarks are to be taken with a grain of salt unless the termination voltage is adjusted to prevent bogging down of the mainboard's reference clock as soon as that one heats up - which then will lead to grossly inflated benchmark results.

There is one thing that is quite interesting about these results, namely how the different synthetic memory benchmarks favor either the 560 or the 660. Sandra clearly prefers the 500 series at the 800 MHz speed and shows a nose to nose race at 1066 MHz bus frequency. Lavalys Everest on the other hand appears to make use of whatever architectural improvements of the 600 series and shows the 500 and 600 series tied at 800 MHz with a clear advantage of the 600 at the 1066 MHz bus. Note that the P4 3.46 Extreme Edition also runs at the 1066 MHz bus, however, as mentioned, it is not able to utilize the 8.5 GB of available bandwidth.

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