Pentium 4 you?
Once again it is time for the PC Authority Labs team to cast their critical eye over the latest and greatest that Intel has to offer, in terms of PCs based around its new Pentium 4 processor. One reas
Once again it is time for the PC Authority Labs team to cast their critical eye over the latest and greatest that Intel has to offer, in terms of PCs based around its new Pentium 4 processor. One reason for running this Labs has been to see whether Intel's new CPU can really cut the mustard in our real-world tests under the controlled conditions of the Labs, and whether you should part with your hard earned cash in order to buy one.
We sent out an open invitation to PC makers to put together a machine based around a P4 of any speed, and with a generous price cap of $6,000. This gave them room to move in terms of specification - or so we thought. From the outset two of the most popular PC manufacturers bowed out, and for some interesting reasons. Compaq could not put a Pentium 4-based PC together for under $6,000, and considering that there are systems in this Labs for as little as $3,480, one wonders what Compaq had in mind as a basic spec for a Pentium 4 system. IBM, on the other hand, has its IntelliStation range of workstations based on the Pentium 4, although it has no consumer PC using the new processor.
In the end we received a wide range of systems and we quickly put them to work on the PC Authority Benchmarks. So, what can one and a half billion cycles per second achieve? After all our rigorous testing our answer is ... it depends. The Pentium 4 is a strange beast, and while it is around the same speed or slower than a similarly configured, and much cheaper, 1GHz Pentium III or Athlon PC in 2D applications, it definitely shows some great potential in 3D. Given time, and some further SSE2 optimisation in popular software, the Pentium 4 could be the undisputed leader in terms of performance. At the moment, however, given its high price, its use of expensive RDRAM, and its performance in 2D, should you buy one? Well, read on and we'll let you be the judge.
Labs Manager/Technical Editor: Tim Dean
Staff Writer: Ashok Zaman
Contributors: Gareth Ogden
This article appeared in the March, 2001 issue of PC Authority.
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