Date:
Sunday , February 01, 2004
Author:
Kyle Bennett
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Prescott Arrives

Intel debuts their new Prescott core today by launching 4 new CPUs while also scaling legacy architectures. We benchmark them all.

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How Hot Is It?

In technical terms we will be seeing the new 3.2E Prescott be able to thermally dissipate 103 watts. The 2.8GHz Prescott is rated for a maximum of 89 watts. This is all considering a Vcore of 1.25v - 1.4v. The new Pentium 4 3.4 Extreme Edition (Gallatin Core) is also rated at a 103 watt TDP (Typical Dissipation Power).

But you know as well as I do that the high end of the specifications mean very little compared to an actual CPU in your box. So we looked at some CPU temps with air and watercooling. Temperatures were taken with an ambient temperature of 80°F.

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Fahrenheit

The above data was taken using the stock heatsink and fan unit sent to us by Intel to use for our 3.2E testing. It is a simple aluminum finned heatsink with a copper core extending up through the middle.

As you can see, the 3.2GHz Prescott ran extremely hot. Our Intel Desktop i875 board auto-assigned Vcore at 1.5 volts.

The Prescott ran so hot that Intel's own Active Monitor software warned with sirens blaring that something was wrong with our CPU temperature. If you do not have a well ventilated case and use aircooling, Prescott CPUs could be a big problem to you.

Now with that said, we ran into no throttling problems with the CPU and it ran our full testing suite without issue. Long-term stress testing was a hurdle that was overcome by the aircooled Prescott as well. So while the temperatures look extremely high, the Prescott does not seem to mind. You should certainly consider other components in your case that might be heat sensitive though, especially when a Prescott is coupled together with a new video card that can get terribly hot as well. Watercooling is getting to look much more attractive and is sure to move even more into the mainstream over the coming year. On to watercooling.

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Fahrenheit

Certainly moving to watercooling helped us out a great deal. In fact, it is hard for us to recommend buying a Prescott and cooling it any other way.

Pipelines

Many of us remember the pain that Intel had to endure when we moved from PIII to P4 CPUs. The doubling of the pipeline length gave the consumer a next-gen technology that was slower than the last, at least at inception. We have seen all of that change as the pipeline changes have facilitated higher clock speeds, and that is what we are seeing today, except this time Intel has done a much better job of it.

Pentium III = 10 Stages

Pentium 4 Northwood = 20 Stages

Pentium 4 Prescott = 31 Stages

Now while at first glance this might seem to be terrible news about the first Prescott CPU processors to come to market. The benchmarks show a much different story.