Intel's Pentium 4 2.4GHz: Taking the Lead

Content Creation Performance

We start out our benchmark analysis with some content creation tests as usual. The first of the bunch is the 2002 edition of Ziff Davis Media's Content Creation Winstone. As with previous versions of Content Creation Winstone, the premise of the test is to run through a script of a handful of applications (in this case 7) and perform various tasks in the applications while switching between one or more of them. The idea is to simulate a present-day multitasking environment using content creation applications, the 7 application tested are listed below:

Content Creation Performance Content Creation Winstone 2002

Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0A GHz AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz AMD Athlon 1.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz 34.8 33.8 33.3 32.9 31.7 30.9 29.7 29.5 28.8 27.9 25.8 | 0 | 7 | 14 | 21 | 28 | 35 | 42

Looking at the numbers alone, the move to 2.4GHz gives the Pentium 4 the advantage over the recently released Athlon XP 2100+. In terms of noticeable performance, most users would be hard pressed to find any differences between any of the CPUs faster than the Pentium 4 2.0A.

Here we can see that both the Athlon XP and Pentium 4 are continuing to scale well with clock speed. In our 2100+ review we mentioned that it would take a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 to intersect (or surpass) the performance curve of the Athlon XP and indeed it has.