As we see from the specification, the increase of the Pentium 4 670 working frequency to 3.8GHz didn’t lead to any TDP increase. Therefore, we can conclude that the CPU doesn’t set any specific requirements to the mainboards and cooling systems and from the compatibility point of view works just like Pentium 4 660. Nevertheless, when we measured its power consumption under real-life workload (maximum workload) we could see that it got slightly higher than that of the predecessor.

Pentium 4 670 power consumption under maximum workload (as usual we used S&M 1.5.1 utility to load the CPU) approaches the power consumption rate of the top dual-core Intel solution, which boasts the TDP of 130W. This is actually one of the reasons why Intel decided to stop raising the Pentium 4 core clock rates. Although our previous CPU overclocking experiments shows that the Prescott-2M core hasn’t yet exhausted its frequency potential. The same was actually proven by the results obtained during the new Pentium 4 670 overclocking.

During our overclocking experiments we used ASUS P5ND2-SLI Deluxe mainboard based on NVIDIA nForce4 SLI (Intel Edition). We overclocked the processor by increasing the FSB frequency, while the PCI Express bus, PCI and memory frequencies were locked at their nominal values (the NVIDIA chipset allows doing it easily). The processor Vcore remained at its nominal value, too, because in case of Pentium 4 processors it is not efficient. During our overclocking experiments we cooled the CPU with the Zalman CNPS7700Cu cooler.

As you can see from the screenshot above, we managed to increase the FSB frequency to 230MHz, which allowed the CPU core clock to rise up to 4.37GHz. The system remained stable at this clock rate. In fact, this is a pretty logical result: we have already managed to overclock Pentium 4 processors beyond the 4.3GHz barrier. As you may remember from our previous reviews, we overclocked the Pentium 4 660 on Prescott-2M core with N0 stepping and Pentium 4 570 processor on Prescott core with E0 stepping notably beyond 4.3GHz.

Summing up, I would like to say that from the point of view of the features and capabilities of the new processor, Pentium 4 670 didn’t prepare any surprises for us. The only remarkable thing worth mentioning separately is the price of the newcomer. Unfortunately, Pentium 4 670 will for now occupy the niche between Pentium 4 660 and Pentium 4 XE 3.73GHz, and will not initiate the long-awaited price reduction for all processor models. Therefore, the new CPU will be offered at a pretty high price - $851. Is it really worth the money they ask for it? Well, our benchmarks results will show right now.