When Intel announced the production of 90nm products over a year ago, the most obvious change was the move to double the existing 512KB L2 cache to a full 1MB of on die memory. This simple transition added more performance than some of the minor clockspeed increases to date, and made the Prescott a household name. Unfortunately, the additional cache comes at a cost, namely a 100 watt plus power output, and a lot of heat. Another inclusion was the addition of SSE3 optimisations, adding 13 new instructions, several of which are geared towards better entertainment and floating point intensive application performance.
This is clearly evident, as it put all but the Athlon 64 4000+ to shame, if only by a narrow gap. This was turned on its head in both synthetic tests and our real world benchmarking. While the additional cache and optimisations undoubtedly help it with Windows type applications such as spell checking, real time virus scanning and 2D performance, it does take a performance hit in gaming.
Used in conjunction with even an average performing graphics card such as the 6600GT series, this chip managed to provide over a 75 frame per second average – more than enough for smooth gaming. Still based on socket 478 architecture, this would make a great upgrade route for users with existing equipment looking for a speed boost.