Probably the last in line for the Socket 478, the Pentium 4 Prescott 3.4E GHz is an improvement over its older brother, the 3.2 GHz Prescott. It features a higher clock speed while maintaining the same thermal specifications. The 3.4 GHz Prescott has optimized Hyper Threading which enhances audio and video applications.
The P4 3.4E GHz has a massive 1 MB L2 cache and 800 MHz FSB! In March, we compared the Pentium 4 3.2 GHz Prescott with the Northwood processor of the same clock speed. We found that the 3.4 GH2 gives about the same results as the 3.2 GHz Prescott.
This may be attributed to the motherboard being the bottleneck. However, the 3.4 GHz Prescott definitely has the power to perform with the right hardware, especially in audio or video encoding. With its improved 90nm manufacturing technology as compared to a 130nm Northwood, and HyperThreading, the Prescott scores well in SiSoft Sandra 2004 -getting a 9268 in the CPU Dryhstone and 3318 in the CPU Whetstone test.
During the Multimedia tests, it scored 24028 in the Integer test and 32380 in the FPU SSE test. Overall, this is a blazing processor which is especially suited for audio- video applications due to its enhanced instruction set. But as with most Intel processors, it comes at a price.
For: A faster processor with a large L2 cache.
Against: This processor gets overheated quickly. Besides, it’s pretty expensive