Intel has had a fairly rough ride in many respects. When the original Pentium 4 Williamette was released, it was narrowly beaten in many benchmarks by the much lower clocked Athlon Thunderbirds, and the gap grew even bigger with the Athlon XPs. From a price/performance aspect, more and more enthusiasts were buying AMD, which offered a cheaper chip, with comparable, if not superior, performance. AMD proved that clock speed shouldn't be the determining factor when it came to gauging system speed. It also didn't help Intel when they pretty much snubbed early adopters by changing the socket form factor from 423 pins to 478.

With the introduction of the Northwood, also known as the Pentium 4 "A", Intel began to show some promise. It improved on the previous generation by doubling the L2 cache from 256 to 512, and lowered the voltage to 1.5v. The Northwoods ran cooler, also in part from its .13 micron fab process, and was selling much cheaper than before. Granted, the high end chips were still very expensive, but the lower end Pentium 4 1.6A proved to be the darling of the overclocking community, where overclocks in excess of 2GHz were not unheard of. It was also very cheap, selling less than 150$ today, and with the relatively easy overclock of 400MHz+, your ticket to 2GHz wouldn't cost all that much. AMD had a reason to sweat a little, but overall, they were still doing alright holding their own against the Intel juggernaught.

A little over 2 months ago, Intel released another updated Pentium 4, known as the "B" model. Architecturally, it is identical to the previous Northwood, except now it brings a 533MHz front side bus to the table. In actuality, it ups the FSB from 100 to 133, quad pumped to 533. We've seen gains from each Pentium 4 revision, and with the highest clocked P4 running at 2.53GHz, AMD, although not beaten entirely, is certainly back playing a bit of catch up.

We're not going to waste too much of your time today. If you're a regular reader, you probably already know everything there is to know about the Pentium 4. We included benchmarks done earlier, more to compound what you may already know.

The Pentium 4 2.4B

The 2.4B Northwood shares the same architecture as the previous Northwoods, including:

8k L1 Cache, 512k On-Die L2 Cache
Socket-478 Form Factor
0.13 micron "Northwood" Core Architecture

Where the "B" comes in is the official 533FSB. Before running out and buying this though, keep in mind that you'll need a motherboard with 533FSB support. Officially, only the i845E/G, i850E and the SiS648 chipsets support it. Keep in mind that any decent motherboard capable of overclocking to a 533FSB can probably support this chip. Another note though is the CPU is multiplier locked. There's no easy way to unlock the CPU, so any overclocking is done strictly by FSB. Although an 845D motherboard will likely overclock well, a newer 845E/G will probably be better suited to gain maximum performance.

If you're paying attention up until this point, the previous Northwood "A" was a 400FSB part. As we'll soon see, the extra bandwidth the "B" provides can make a significant difference in the benchmarks.

Like all P4s, the 2.4B comes equipped with a heatspreader. This serves two purposes. For one thing, it helps to evenly distribute the heat (hence the name), but it also protects the CPU core. Unlucky Athlon owners can probably tell you stories of how they chipped their cores. Granted, in many cases, it's simoly user error, but the Athlon core is prone to cracking if your not careful. With the P4, I don't think it's possible (within reason).

Of course, one reason why the Pentium 4 may be a little more resistant to breakage is the heatsink the retail CPUs come packaged with. All Pentium 4 motherboards ship with the retaining bracket, and installing the heatsink is as easy as dropping it in, and pushing down two levers. I generally don't have problems with Athlon heatsinks, but AMD could certainly learn a thing or two about Intel's clipping design. I did find it a bit troubling with the amount of force exerted by the heatsink, as the motherboards tested were slightly being bent from it. I have swapped the heatsink several times over the past 6 weeks, and the motherboards are still working.

Although only 1.5V is needed for the P4, make no mistake, ...this is one hot puppy. Even then, it doesn't run as hot as the fastest Athlons, which is why a large heatsink and a low RPM fan was all that is needed for the CPU. Full load temperatures for the 2.4B range from 53-56C which isn't too bad with stock cooling. The reason why I think the heatsink deserves mention is the fact that it's so well designed. It's easy to install and is silent. Enthusiasts, however, may probably choose a beefier cooling solution.

Overclocking

We hammered this pretty hard in our MSI Max2-BLR review, so here's a summary...

The default setting is 18x133, so as you can see, the multiplier is already pretty high. As we've mentioned ealier, the multiplier is locked, so we had to go about it the old fashion way, upping the FSB.

Cooling was done with the stock Intel heatsink. I tested with a Thermaltake Volcano 7+ as well, but the copper heatsink didn't really do much to aid in our overclocking endeavor. vCore was boosted to 1.8v, and the ram timings were set to the most conservative settings.

Right off the bat, we went for a 166FSB (we were using PC2700 ram), which proved to be a mistake as the system never got to POST. I dropped down to 160FSB with similar results. In fact, the PC did POST, but the screen went blank at the Promise boot up.

At 158FSB, we managed to get to the Windows splash screen, but were immediately greeted with a blue screen, critical failure. At 155FSB, we got into Windows, and were even able to run the SiSoft CPU benchmark. I tried opening Photoshop to capture the screenshot, but it wouldn't start. In fact, all other applications were unresponsive when the executible was double-clicked. I rebooted, and the system wouldn't POST, forcing a CMOS reset.

Our conclusions up until this point are that the motherboard is capable of overclocks of 155+, if your cooling is up to speed. I should point out that the stock heatsink runs at about 58C under load, at stock speeds, whereas at 155FSB, temperatures were in the low 60s, so it wasn't that hot, but certainly warmer than we'd like.

In the end, we settled down on what we felt was the most stable, and highest performing overclock. This meant running the ram at it's fastest settings, while maintaining a decent overclock. The magic number was...

We were able to do everything we typically do, such as play a few games, run benchmarks, and working on this article. I've seen higher overclocks from this board, so your milage may vary.

Test Setup

Intel Pentium 4 "B" 2.4GHz @ 533FSB
MSI 845 Max2 - BLR
2 x 256MB Crucial PC2700 DDR
2 x 80GB Maxtor ATA100 RAID-0
PNY Verto Ti4600

We will be testing the above against another MSI motherboard, the MSI 845-A, which is similar to the MSI 845-ARU which we reviewed earlier. This MSI board is a 400FSB, DDR part, already patched with the latest BIOS update, but lacks onboard RAID. Tests will be done with a 2.4GHz Northwood "A", to illustrate the differences from 400FSB to 533FSB.

The 2.4GHz "A" is from a Dell Dimension, running a i850 Chipset. This system will also be thrown into the benchmarks, despite being a 400MHz part, to specifically compare the memory scores. Because it's a Dell, overclocking will be impossible, and tests will be done at stock speed. We're including this system to see if RDRAM will have any effect on CPU benchmarks.

Knowing full well that this sample MSI 845-ARU is capable of 133FSB, we'll also be dropping in the Northwood "B" CPU in for an apples to apples test of the two motherboards @ 133FSB.

We will be certain to perform tests where the video card should not be a limiting factor. What that means is for the gaming benchmarks, tests will be run at 640x480, stressing the CPU and motherboard subsystem.

SiSoftware Sandra

Although a synthetic benchmark, it's a popular one, freely available if you wish to make comparison benchmarks. We will be testing the CPU, MMX and memory speeds of all the platforms.

CPU Arithmetic Benchmark

The scores between the two Northwood "A" platforms are close, as I expected them to be. However, the Northwood "B" shows a significant jump from 400FSB to 533FSB, at the same clockspeed. Dropping the Northwood "B" into the MSI 845-A, and overclocking it to 133, it comes close to the 845E, but after 5 consecutive benchmarks, with a reboot in between, it still couldn't catch up to the "E". I guess the elves at Intel did some tweaking.

CPU Multimedia Benchmark

Although the scores were close, we see the added bandwidth from the FSB jump has paid dividends for the Northwood "B". Even the overclocked Northwood "A" wasn't close, and lagged behind quite a bit. The Dell Dimension did alright, being a little faster than the 845D chipset.

CPU Memory Benchmark

As expected, the RDRAM based 850 clobbers the DDR boards by a wide margin. This shouldn't be too surprising for those of you who follow the memory trends.

PC Mark 2002

Click for Online Result Browser

As with the SiSoft scores, our PC Mark scores follow a similar trend. The 533FSB really does make a difference for CPU horsepower. The RDRAM system does pull ahead in the memory benchmarks, but as we've seen before, the 533FSB does pretty much nothing to pull the memory scores any higher.

3D Mark 2001SE

Click for Online Result Browser

3D Mark is one of those benchmark apps that will eat up as much processing power as it can. Benchmarks were run at default 1024x768, as I felt 640x480 is getting to be fairly pointless. The Northwood "B" easily pulls away from the Northwood "A", demonstrating that in fact, FSB is king.

Quake 3 Arena

It's getting old, I know, but Quake 3 is still a decent benchmark for almost anything. For motherboards and CPUs, we run at the lowest settings and fire away. It's interesting to note that the RDRAM system is faster than the stock DDR setup, since their FSB speeds are equal.

Jedi Knight 2

Jedi Knight is still a Quake 3 engine game, but heavily modified. It's extemely taxing, but like Quake 3, the Northwood "B" scores another victory.

Final Words

We didn't include any AMD benchmarks for a couple of reasons. The main reason is I haven't received the latest Thoroughbred CPU yet. Secondly, from the dozens of reviews I've seen, the speed crown has pretty much been handed over to Intel this time.

Does this make the Northwood "B" the best choice for speed freaks? Not necessarily. For this amount of horsepower, you're gonna have to pay for it. The Athlon on the otherhand does perform closely in benchmarks, and you'll be hard pressed to notice much in the "real world". Of course, as any AMD fanatic will tell you, they're a heck of a lot cheaper.

I do in fact own an Athlon XP 2000+, and although there is a substantial clock speed difference, the 2000+ does quite well. However, that being said, there isn't any doubt that the Northwood "B" is the fastest CPU to pass through our labs.

Pros: Fast.

Cons: Expensive. Not the best price/performance ratio purchase.

Bottom Line: It's bloody fast, but it ain't cheap. Power users with no budget should seriously give it a look. More cost conscious buyers should look to the cheaper Northwood "A", or even better, an Athlon.