Pentium 4 3.2 GHz + Epox Canterwood 875

We will not talk about Canterwood and Intel P4 FSB 800 since you can read that from our past review where we said it all.

Pentium 3.2 GHz, is frequency wise, an extremely fast part and this is almost the last stop for Intel with the current Pentium 4 architecture.

In the meantime, Intel changed from 0.18 micron process to 0.13µ since with 0.18µ there where not too much headroom for a frequency increase. The first P4 worked at 1.5 GHz which means that Intel managed to double the speed of its CPUs in just two years.

Having AMD as quite a hard competitor, Intel had to do a lot of things to stay in the game. There have been quite a few refreshments of the marchitecture and the front side bus was stuck at 400MHz for quite some time.

That processor only had 256KB cache memory while the new Northwood has 533 MHz FSB and 512KB of cache memory really makes a difference. This rev, Northwood C, uses hyperthreading.

In the middle of April Intel introduced a new core now with FSB 800 MHz but, ironically, this core worked at exactly 3GHz making it frequency wise 60 MHz slower from the last processor. In practice the FSB 800 really made a difference.

This time Intel has introduced a P4 working at 3.2 GHz or 3200 MHz that just follows natural path of performance increase in this P4 generation. Intel promised us 3.2 GHz later in Q2 and that is exactly what it's done, just squeezing in.

This CPU gets its frequency from a 16 times 200 multiplier, which is the real FSB frequency just quad pumped to 800 MHz.

The 3.4 GHz will be the starting point for the new core codenamed Prescott, a CPU developed using 90 nanometer process technology, with one MB of cache memory, a new set of instructions and later a new socket that isn't a socket anymore.

The 3.2GHz will be the fastest CPU from Intel for the rest of the Q2, the whole of Q3 and quite possibly a good part of Q4 before Prescott arrives.

Test

The temperature during testing was always around 45 Celsius when we used Intel's massive reference cooler that will possibly be shipped with retail CPUs.

We tested 3.2 GHz CPU in an Epox 875 board and compared it to the last P4 that ran at 3 GHz with FSB 800 and Corsair XMS3500 CL2 memory with 2-2-2-5 settings. This board uses a now very famous feature of 865 PE chipset in last few days called Performance Acceleration Technology (PAT). The Epox board features all the good things about the 875 Canterwood such as dual DDR 400, AGP 8X, FSB 800 CPU, Dual S ATA ports, USB 2.0 and Gigabit Ethernet, dual S-ATA support in ICH5 Southbridge and some other features. The overclocking options are simply amazing on this board. With AMD we used a Shuttle XPC with 3000+ that is still FSB 333 CPU simply since we haven't got any access to Athlon 3200+ the one that works with FSB400 MHz.

Here are the tables with the results and there's not much to say about them, they're pretty self explanatory.

Intel's 3.2GHz Pentium 4 and its 200 more MHz can be seen as an advtange in every test.

Conclusion
If you have a 3GHz FSB 800 CPU this may not be a great performance jump, but if you want the fastest and most expensive Intel CPU around, this is the one.

An Athlon with FSB 333 simply cannot keep up with this CPU but I believe that gap between FSB400 Athlon and 3.2 GHz is likely to be much smaller. µ

See Also
Another Pentium 4 3.20GHz review from the INQUIRER