Anandtech reviews the 3.2EE vs 3.2E vs 3.2C - surprising results!

[lookin4dlz]

In May with the new chipset, DDR-2, PCI Express, a new Prescott stepping, etc. I think we'll see the Prescott become the chip to have...

Intel 3.2E vs. 3.2EE vs. 3.2C: Comparing Baseline Performance

What perhaps stands out the most is that for all the negative press Prescott has received at launch, it is really a decent performer that is very close to Northwood, at least at the 3.2GHz speed. As Anand found in Intel's Pentium 4 E: Prescott Arrives with Luggage, Prescott scales faster than Northwood as speed increases. At 3.2GHz, performance is closer than we first thought it would be, and Prescott is certainly ahead of Northwood by the time you reach 3.7 to 3.8GHz.

For our standard "real application" benchmarks, Multimedia Content Creation Winstone and Office Winstone, Prescott and Northwood performed virtually the same in these baseline tests.

The areas that most surprised us were Media Encoding and Workstation Performance. We expected P4EE to lead in these benchmarks, but instead, Prescott was the top performer. Workstation Performance was generally dominated by Prescott, so those applications that depend on the types of operations tested in SPECviewperf will perform best with the Prescott 3.2E.

The one area where Prescott is poorest is gaming performance... Prescott is slower compared to Northwood in this area, but the real difference is 0% to 5% in most cases.