Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz: Does the prophecy hold true?

Gaming Performance (cont)

Under Serious Sam, a relatively new (and fun) game, the Pentium 4 at 1.7GHz and the Athlon at 1.33GHz are separated by no more than 2 fps.  As you can see, this benchmark is scaling wonderfully with clock speed although slightly more so for the Pentium 4 since the 1.33GHz Athlon only holds a 16% increase in performance over the 1.0GHz Athlon.

We will be switching over to the final version of Serious Sam after this review.

In our final gaming test we see that the Pentium 4 once again takes the lead under Mercedes Benz Truck Racing.  In fact, all of the Pentium 4 processors take the lead here indicating that an architectural advantage is keeping the line ahead of the competition here.  Potential candidates for the explanation include cache/memory bandwidth or the Pentium 4’s high-bandwidth FSB.