Two new features of the Pentium 4 Northwood and the newest Intel chipsets are Hyper-Threading and Dual-channel RAM controllers. Hyper-Threading works by turning one physical processor into two virtual ones. Dual-channel RAM controllers work by turning two physical 64-bit wide DIMMS into a single 128-bit wide logical DIMM, which should increase total RAM bandwidth. So far, it has been very hard for users without these technologies to see if they really do increase performance. In this article we'll take a look at a number of real world benchmarks to see if these new technologies really do increase performance, or if their usefulness is limited to marketing hype.

Pentium 4 2.8 "C"
1024Mb OCZ EL DDR, PC3200
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro All-in-Wonder
MSI Neo2-FIS2R i875P Motherboard
80Gb Seagate 7200 8Mb Cache SATA HDD

Quake 3 Timedemo 1, all settings minimum, 640x480 resolution
Hexus Pifast Pi calculation script, to 10 million places
3dMark 2003, all settings default, 320X200 resolution
Unreal Tournament 2003, all settings minimum, 320X240 resolution
PC Mark 2002 CPU and RAM tests
Adobe Premiere 6.5, Divx Codec v5.1.




Here are the results for the Quake 3 Timedemo, in frames per second:



Note that the higher numbers here indicate better performance. Hyper-Threading doesn't increase performance in this single-threaded application, but it is interesting to note that it doesn't hurt it either. Here the added RAM bandwidth provided by dual-channel DDR helps quite a bit, with scores averaging almost 40 FPS higher.

Here are the results from the Pifast calculations:



Note that Pi was calculated to 10 million places in the number of seconds shown above, and a lower time is better. It is interesting to note that Dual-channel RAM helped the performance of this highly CPU dependant benchmark, although the increase is small.

Here are the results from the 3dMark tests:



Once again, there is very little difference between dual and single processors, although dual channel gives a couple hundred more 3dMarks.

Here are the results from the Unreal Tournament 2003 Timedemos:



As shown above, Dual channel RAM gets a few more extra FPS than Hyper-Threading, since this game is not multi-threaded. In one instance, Hyper-Threading actually hurts performance some.

Here are the results from the PcMark 2002 tests:



It is interesting to see that the new RAM controller increases bandwidth by such a margin, even though the other benchmarks don't show it. The CPU result changed very little.

Here are the results from the video encoding tests:



Here the results are mixed. Hyper-Threading helps reduce encoding time greatly, and the dual channel RAM helps too. The fastest time we were able to encode in was 31.70 seconds. We used a 10Mb uncompressed video file for this test, which we encoded using Divx 5.1, and the default settings.

The results in general lead to a basic conclusion: Hyper-Threading can increase the performance of multithreaded applications, and it doesn't seem to decrease the performance of single threaded applications by even a noticeable margin. Dual Channel RAM, on the other hand, seems to increase system performance across the board, from gaming to complicated video editing. It is clear, however, that these performance boosting features work best when both are enabled. It is likely that the benefits of these new technologies will become more apparent as software begins to be written to take advantage of these features.