Intel Pentium 4 3.2 GHz (800Mhz FSB) Processor

Company: Intel
Product: P4 3.2 GHz
Street Price: ~$unknown
Date Reviewed: June 23, 2003
Reviewed By: Joey Chao

Overclocking the 3.2C:

We know that Intel does not in any way condone overclocking but there are going to be users who do it anyway. As usual, overclocking will void the warranty of this processor and may result in instabilities and or damage to the processor. Our overclocking results with this processor were very good considering it is an engineering sample. Generally speaking, the retail version overclock better than the ES chips. Working in 5 MHz increments on the FSB we were able to get up to 230 MHz FSB, which puts our CPU at 3.68 GHz (230x16). To run 100% stable at this speed we had to use 1.6V for the VCore. Keep in mind that we only used the stock Intel cooler and that results will vary a lot by the type of cooling that is used on the CPU.

At this speed the benchmarks really showed an improvement. If you look at the SiSoft Sandra scores, below you can see just how much higher the processor scores when compared to the stock speeds. It is up to the end user to decide whether throwing away a warranty on a $600+ CPU is worth the increase in performance.