I always like to kick off processor reviews with a SiSoft benchmark. This is a synthetic benchmark, so "real world" numbers are not given (in other words, you look at arbitrary numbers, rather than something like frames per second, or decoding time).

SiSoft Sandra uses excellent tools for theoretical CPU benchmarking for comparison purpose. Version 2002 is updated to support the newest CPU's, such as the Northwood Pentium 4 we're testing.

The SiSoft Sandra CPU tests give us a performance increase of about 10%, perfectly matching the clock speed increase (within the margin of error at least).

PCMark 2002

PCMark 2002 is an excellent benchmark that spits out a nice quick, easy to contrast number.  It gives you 3 results, based on different parts of the system - a CPU score, a Memory score, and a Hard Drive score.  PCM2K2 works very well in the first 2 tests, but I have seen some really wonky HDD scores.  HDD scores are irrelevant to our needs right now anyway, so we just leave them out.

There's the 10% increase again.  The Memory Score is also showing a nice increase.

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