Intel Pentium 4 640 review

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Verdict:

The Pentium 4 640 and 660 don't perform much better than the standard Pentium 4 540 and 560 processors, but as the price difference is so small it's worth spending the extra money to ensure that your PC is ready for 64-bit applications. If you are upgrading an LGA775 motherboard that doesn't support dual-core processors, the Pentium 4 640 is a good buy.

Review Date: 21 Nov 2005

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Our Rating 5 stars out of 5

ExpertReviews Award

Review
Specs

Core: Prescott

Frequency: 3.2GHz

Socket: LGA775

Process: 90nm

Cores: One

Instructions: MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, EM64T

Multiplier: 16x

External bus: 200MHz

Effective FSB speed: 800MHz

Level 1 cache: 16KB

Level 2 cache: 2,048KB

The Pentium 4 600 series was Intel's first processor range to support the EM64T instruction set. The 600 series processors also have twice the amount of Level 2 cache included with the 500 series: 2MB instead of 1MB.

We tested processors from the top and bottom ends of the 600 series. The Pentium 4 640 runs at 3.2GHz and the 660 at 3.6GHz, and these are available for £160 and £275 respectively. This makes them only slightly more expensive than their equivalents in the Pentium 4 500 series.

The 640 and 660's extra cache made little difference in PCMark04 and the Shopper application benchmarks. The 640 and 660's scores of 4,889 and 5,466 were only just ahead of the Pentium 4 540 and 560, and the 660 performed slightly worse than the 560 in the overall Shopper benchmark with a score of 128.

The processors did manage an extra couple of frames in Far Cry, but their performance advantage will only become apparent in applications that take advantage of the 64-bit instruction set.

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