3Dmark05 score

I have a GEN 5 so SLI is not available to me.

Hijackers

In all of the benchmarks I've seen the 6xx series Pentium 4s are as fast or slightly faster at equivalent clock speeds than the 5xx series. Although the 6xx series has 1MB more cache, the latency is a bit higher than the cache on the 5xx series. However, you're wrong when you say the 6xx series P4s are slower when in most cases they are FASTER than the 5xx series, albeit not by much. There are some programs that can take more advantage of the extra 1MB of cache, while with most programs it makes little, if any difference. You need to do some more research on this. I'll refer you to this site: http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/intel_pentium_4_660_3.73ee/ . You'll see that in games the Pentium 4 660 @ 3.6GHz is able to keep up with and even beat a Pentium 4 570 @3.8 GHz in several gaming benchmarks. So the extra 1MB of cache CAN make a difference.

and on this site:

http://www.sharkeyextreme.com/hardware/cpu/article.php/3484631

The extra 2MB of cache helps to improve memory access and decrease cache misses with the longer pipeline of the Prescott. The Pentium 4 660 is also a clear winner over the equivalently clocked Pentium 4 560.

The Pentium 4 still loses out to the Athlon 64 in games, but the P4 660 is able to come fairly close to the Athlon 64 3800+ in many benchmarks. It loses out by 10-20 frames but that is not a big deal when you're talking about the difference between 108 frames and 97 frames.

I agree that the main benefit of the 6xx line is the inclusion of 64-bit capability. The extra 1MB cache can make a difference in some situations, but in many others it is not a big deal. You also have other features like Speedstep technology and Execute Disable bit which can help protect against viruses. The 6xx series was Intel's attempt to match the Athlon 64's feature set. However, to say that an equivalently clocked 6xx Pentium 4 is slower than a 5xx Pentium 4 is completely erroneous. There are cases where the Pentium 4 660 can beat a Pentium 4 570 that's 200MHz faster! Take a look at the sites I posted above.

Intel also offers 5x1 CPUs that have 64-bit capability but only 1MB cache. For example, the Pentium 4 571 is the same as the 570 except for 64-bit capability. The only Pentium 4 I considered was the 6xx series. I still like to have the extra cache available. I didn't even consider a Pentium D because it is clocked even lower at 3.2MHz, and multi-threaded games won't arrive for some time yet. It would be even more bottlenecked by SLI.

As for being bottlenecked by SLI, I knew it would happen. But all my games run great. I'm very happy with the P4 660. It may not be as fast as higher clocked Athlon 64s, but it is NO SLOUCH when it comes to games. As I mentioned, even a top-end Athlon FX-57 running at 2.8GHz will be somewhat bottlenecked by two 7800 GTX cards in SLI. We now have video cards that can outpace the fastest CPUs available!