AMD Barton XP3000+ (400) vs Intel Pentium 4 3.0G (800)
Bluetooth 29 Apr 2003

AMD Barton XP3000+ (400) vs Intel Pentium 4 3.0G (800)

As we all know, Intel and AMD has been rushing out with newer processors to take advantage of the higher fsb. The most apparent jump was from Intel P4 533 (133 Mhz fsb) to the 800Mhz (200Mhz FSB). This paints another chapter in PC industry as AMD follows suit with an upcoming model known as the Barton 400 which runs at 200Mhz FSB.

Sometimes, readers will ask me, what is difference between all these 200,400, 800. Well the simple way to differentiate them is to check what speeds is the CPU rated at. For example an Intel P4 400Mhz model is actually running at 100Mhz FSB, 533 is running 133 and 800 is running 200. The "multiplier" of 4 or what is well known quad pumped. That is how you derive 800Mhz (200x4).

On the AMD front, it is somewhat non quad pumped but doubly pumped. Well that is a processor rated operating at 266Mhz is actually in fact running 133Mhz FSB x 2. The current Thoroughbreds are running at 333Mhz or 166x2. The yet to be released processor will be based on 200Mhz fsb, thus it is the Barton 400.

Supporting chipsets

Intel is in the forefront in this Mhz race and to date, Intel has introduced a workstation chipset known as Intel Canterwood (Intel i875P). This new chipset take advantage of Dual Channel DDR400 which gives amazing memory performance that was never seen before (if you read our Canterwood board reviews). Next month, Intel is slated to announced what is known as the Intel i865 which is known as Springdale. This new chipset will also support the 800Mhz processor and can be run in Dual Channel DDR400 mode too.

On the AMD front, the K7 has the support of three manufacturers namely SiS, VIA and NVIDIA. To date, nVIDIA has the nForce2 SPP which supports Dual Channel DDR400 and future Barton 400 processors (officially is nForce2 Ultra 400). VIA and SiS has yet to release any supporting chipset for this new processor yet. The VIA solution would be the VIA KT600 and the SiS would be SiS 748 both single channel DDR solution.

It would be really exciting to see how well the 3Ghz processors performs in benchmarks especially the Barton 400 which actually clocks at 2.1Ghz but rated at 3000+. The processor is run on a EPoX 8RDA3+ nForce2 C1 stepping board with 2 x 256M Corsair RAM. The Pentium 4 3.0G (800) is tested on various Canterwood boards from ASUS, Gigabyte and AOPEN.

In the next few pages, we have put together all the benchmarks ranging from 3D graphics games benchmarks to desktop applications and multimedia content creation application benchmarks.

Next

(C) Copyright 1998-2009 OCWorkbench.com