PCA Forums

On the gaming side of things, if you go back and look at where our Athlon64 3000+ landed in the benchmarks, it is hard to argue against this $200 CPU. In fact repeatedly, the A64 3000+ simply makes the Prescott and the rest of the Pentium 4 bunch look bad, even the Extreme Editions. If you are looking at building a gaming system today, the Athlon64 is very attractive.

We'll be taking a closer look at the Prescott in the coming weeks. Our initial thoughts are mixed. Enthusiasts won't like it. Intel, truth be told, doesn't really care about them. It just needs a consumer CPU that will keep escalating on the MHz front. The Prescott will certainly do that.

To summarize, Prescott and gaming is not necessarily a match made in heaven, despite all the optimizations but as long as there are no games that will take advantage of SSE3, Prescott really does not look that great....

...As it stands, Prescott is a somewhat mixed bag, at least with respect to performance. The higher speed grades do not add much, the lower speed grades are only competitive for the budget oriented user. On the other hand, the smaller die size makes it very cost effective to produce Prescott and that's after all where the profits come in that in the long run pay the bills. The current versions are still plagued with thermal problems that need to be addressed, once again, it is the devil in the detail that will require better ventilation or other measures in order to avoid temperature derating also of other system components such as HDD, memory and / or graphics cards caused by the heating power of the processor.

Originally posted by DaMaN
the P4 3.2 EE is the beast at the moment IMHO. You should see this thing ripping and roaring.

AMD is still the best bet when it comes to business/gaming/2D workstation either from a performance perspective or because of a superior price/performance ratio, while Intel offers the best in encoding and 3D rendering performance.

It is interesting that all of the Athlon64 chips outperform the Intel Pentium 4 EE in gaming, except for the comparable performance in the older Quake 3. This again demonstrates the superiority of the A64 as a gaming platform. The one area where Intel dominates is Media Encoding, where the 3.2EE, 3.2 and even the 3.0 lead all Athlon64 family chips.

Our benchmarks show the 3400+ is a fast CPU that is deserving of the 3400+ Performance Rating. It is faster than Intel's comparably priced 3.2 Pentium 4 in almost every benchmark and even outperforms the pricey 3.2EE in most benchmarks.