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Intel Northwood CPU Review

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the king-of-the-hill dept.

gcshaw2nd writes: "Here it is, the first hands-on review I've seen of Intel's new Northwood chip, running at two gigahertz. It overclocks like a hog, easily to 2.5Ghz."

2 of 233 comments (clear)

  1. Surest sign of obsolescence by tunah · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Now I *know* my computer is obsolete: my CPU speed is just the difference between reccommended and possible clock speed settings on the new one.

    --
    Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
  2. The CPU is only one contributor to performance by DocSnyder · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When I bought my home workstation about three years ago, the CPU (K6-II/400) was one of the cheapest parts of it. What really made it powerful are the SCSI cache controller and a fast Seagate drive, as well as an adequate (for these days 128 MB were more than enough) amount of RAM. Of course it depends on what you do with your box, but to be honest, most of the time you're waiting for the harddisk, either for loading data or for swapping virtual memory.

    Three years later, the only thing I added was some more RAM, with the rest of my workstation being the same. It is still very usable, and I rarely see the need for a more powerful CPU.

    In contrast, my former office workstation was a P3-800 with 192 MB RAM (some of which to be "abused" for graphics), an IDE drive and a one-chip-does-everything Intel i810 on the mainboard. SETI was the only thing it could do faster. On pushing the IDE system or the network, sound playback got distorted, and the X server became quite unreactive, it even stalled for a few seconds. A compile run made it impossible to do anything different in parallel, so I would have needed two machines - one for compiling and one for the desktop.

    AFAICT especially on Intel systems the trend goes towards integrated one-chip-does-everything systems like i810 and its successors, which can handle everything from graphics to sound to IDE to networking. Of course the Intel people want their customers to come back later, and save some money by using only one chip instead of several ones. Most users will think it's the CPU which is too slow... and buy a new 2 GHz monster with another i8xx-crippled mainboard.