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Intel Northwood CPU Review
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."
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Aside from the meager "5-10%" performance boost per clock that GamePC reports, the new PC1066 RDRAM and 533MHz FSB coming in a few months offers a "12%" performance boost per clock, when used with the original P4.
Northwood + 533MHz FSB/PC1066 RDRAM should be quite nifty.
The PC1066 benchmarks are here.
According to that chart there, PC1066 RDRAM actually has lower latency than PC133 SDRAM. I don't know how accurate that is, but it says PC1066 RDRAM takes 207 cycles for 128 bytes, and PC133 takes 229 cycles (PC800 took 270)?
Maybe I'm reading that wrong or don't know some specifics about RDRAM architecture, but that sounds nifty...
Is this needed? I mean seriously needed. I saw the benefits a few years ago in getting higher speeds out of celerons, but mother of god, are you seriously going to notice a difference overclocking chips that are already at 2000 or so Mhz? I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but why take life off your cpu(s) when you don't need to? I don't know about most people, but I can't afford a new $800 chip every 4 or 5 months. Hell, I still can't afford to upgrade from my dual pentium pro's...
Shift happens. Fire it up.
umm, no it isn't. it is 100Mhz(+/- 1 Mhz) * 20. clock frequency isn't done by powers of 2.
Does any one really notice the difference in speed between even 1.7GHz and the 2.0Ghz? I know it will scrape time from a kernel re-compile, but what non-IT consumers care about this? Especially considering you can get a dual 1.3 GHz celeron system for next to nothing.
;-)
I think Intel would make more money by even lowering prices even further and offering P4 SMP (non-Xeon) - they'd sell more chips... and make me happier
Story posted 2 minutes ago, server is hosed already.
Maybe they need to quit talking about the P4 and pop one in their server already?
Now I *know* my computer is obsolete: my CPU speed is just the difference between reccommended and possible clock speed settings on the new one.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
Some people have had that little gem up to 3Ghz. Not exactly in English, but pictures say a thousand words.
2 GHz = 2000 MHz = 2000000 kHz = 2000000000 Hz. Metric. With bytes, however, 1 K = 1024 bytes, see below. 1 Mbyte = 1024*1024 bytes. 1 Gbyte = 1024*1024*1024 bytes. In metric we use a lowercase k to indicate 1000, the uppercase "K" was introduced in the seventies when RAM banks, which are addressable in binary, appeared. Thus 2^10=1024, which is close enough to a k that it's called a K.
Really, does anybody really need a faster processor? They really should concentrate on increasing the size and speed of the data bus, rather than increasing the speed of the processor.
"It overclocks like a hog..." :)
LOL, I've never seen an overclocked animal
I'm trying to get a visual around "overclocks like a hog" .... What's up with that?
Davo -- Free speech, free software, AND free beer.
That's not true, they use RDRAM or SDRAM or DDR SDRAM. In fact there's a brand new artice that benchmarks them all.
Take your pick of RAM (although RDRAM and DDR are the only real choices).
Actually rdram isn't that expensive anymore, and you shouldn't compare it to sdram.. sdram is obsolete. Ddr ram is the closest competitor, and it's price is now on the rise, and not that far off from rdram's price anymore. Lastly, p4 systems run best with rdram, even ddr speeds are not as good with it. So rdram is not that bad at all, besides the rambus' obviously screwing legal practices.
The Slashdot Effect: A new for
Apples for apples, I'm not going to throw away my Athlon!
All speling, factual, tact, and/or grametical errers be the result of netwerk interpherance or# transmition ererrs.
Here's a printer-friendly version of the article, which is easier on the viewer and the server.
Here I am, just comming back from a week vacation, and they can make 2Ghz chips already? When I left, the best I could get was a 266Mhz!
now even quicker !! this page claims it has a world record
3023mhz !
That it is possible to overclock... who could live with a bare 2GHz? Not that I would know, fastest I have accessible is 1GHz. :)
No.
= 2000000000 Hz. Metric.
:)
and how much is that in imperial hertz?
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
John, Intel's VP of engineering : You mean "gigahertz" I 'spose : well, we can't, CPU core designs are reaching their limits. Technically, it's not very realistic you know.
Richard : Who's talking about technical stuffs here ? I mean, just crank up the gogohertz man, we need more hype fast.
John How about if we designed synchronous processors instead ? now *that* would be sexy.
Richard : You mean hotter than more gogohertz ?
John : Sure, it would impress the technical crowd, and we'd have a real actual breakthrough in CPU design in less than 5 year. That's pretty hot, I'd say.
Richard : Yeah, well, tech people are nice, but the Joe Sixpacks who walk into Fry's and buy a new PC, they want more gogohertz.
John : *sigh* Well, I guess we could double the clock and put a frequency divider inside the CPU
etc ...
Something tells me that the nVidia NForce chipset helped out in a few of those benchmarks. Still, the Athlon is quite impressive, and I have heard it will overclock all the way to 2.6 GHz.
Otherwise I am spending thousands of extra dollars for the "blessing" of being on the bleeding edge.
I can see the need to shorten compile times, etc. especially for big projects. But otherwise I look at 'good enough"
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Are hogs known for their overclocking potential? Have I missed something?
Why is it that every story about ever increasing CPU speeds is met by about 50% postings claiming that such speed isn't necessary unless you "want 500 fps in Quake"? I've seen these sorts of posts since back in the BBS days when the new 486 came out, immediately to be met by 50 posts (usually by people who feel a need to justify whatever they own) claiming that "a 386/33 is more power than anyone needs anyways!". Bah.
There are countless benefits to the increased speed (and of course like always: Once you use a higher speed system for a while suddenly you notice, clear as a sunny day, that yes there IS a very noticable difference, and suddenly that previously adequate machine seems pokey), and if you don't realize what they are then continue using whatever it is you use, but save the "500 fps in Quake" rhetoric (here I am with what would have been a cutting edge machine one year ago and Operation Flashpoint runs with frame rates in the single digits, yet even still it isn't a fraction as complex of a "world" as it could be if more powerful systems were prevalent).
Try 2.8 GHz
Or why not 3.0!
-----
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.
Why all they have to do is say that it's a PPC 2000+
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Also To 2.8ghz
:)
But now, a little rant...
Look at the next and last alpha that will come out, it will SMOKE at a fraction of the speed the P4 will be at the end of the year. That's what I call going out with a bang. It's a shame such a technology got obliterated in part because of Intel's markettign muscle, we're going to be set back for 2 years for them to catch up on this technology and performance (they've got some alpha people in their staff now that will teach them how to do more than overclocking and recycling like putting SMT on chips for example, that will be one great leap, it's in at least one of the northwood flavor I think).
Watch out for the Hammer when it will come out, it still going to beat intel's latest offering mhz per mhz in desktop performance (can't speak too fast about the server side though.)
Look at the PowerPC, as much as I hate apple's hyping to keep their blinded userbase into beleiving that they hold the only computer that should exist on the surface of the planet, the powerPC architechture has proven itself to beat the crap out of Intel mhz to mhz side to side (and no I am not talking about that "hey loading an image in photoshop on the mac is 2x faster than on a PC, but I won't mention that it's totally unrelated to the CPU and the mac is running on a SCSI cheetah while the PC was running a 5400 rpm 5 gig drive", I am talking about rendering on different crossplatform software like premiere, lightwave, maya, etc).
This goes without mentionning SUN or MIPS or any other cpus on the planet that has interresting technologies ASIDE FROM CLOCKSPEED.
So again, Screw the MHZ hype, I am a power user, I love doing 3d rendering, I administer a small renderfarm at work, I love raw power, anything that comes out and had a power factor gets my attention, it's nice to see stuff running fast, but I am not impressed at ALL with the MHZ hype. Especially for the PRICE you have to pay to cover all the media and marketting hype... Intel's Hype tax like I often call it. Also, what you see is the MHZ going skyrocket... How much do you thihnk they had to cut in the design so that it stays that stable at these speeds? why do you think the athlon4 can't run at 2.2ghz? design.. intel had to cut in some places so the cpu could be easily cranked up that much, they had to redesign part of it, and that's why you need SSE2 optimisation and the pipeline for standard FPU is so bad. It's not because Intel doesn't know how to design a FPU, it's because they HAD to cut on it...
My precision 530 workstation that runs dual 1.7ghz P4 for the price I payed, I find a dual AthlonXP or MP 1900+ far more impressive for 1/2 of the price. Heck, you want to be in the cool factor? get a Dell 8100 with DVD/CD-RW Geforce2Go 32megs and 1600x1200 15" LCD screen, now THAT'S a nice little piece of technology. And quake plays soooo smooth on it... I won't waste my personnal money or blast my budget for a chip that can generate small blackholes because of it's so great CLOCKSPEED. Gimme raw speed at a decent price. For the price you'd pay that northwood alone you could probably get 2 athlonXP and it's mainboard that beat the crap out of the P4 for the same price of the cpu alone.
enuff
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Could you imagine a beowulf cluster of these?
I really get tired of people who say that.
D/\ Gooberguy
Karma: Meh (Mostly from meh.)
In the articles, the tester admits to having the SSE-2 patch installed on all the machines prior to the rendering test in Photoshop. Even with the advantage to the Pentiums, the athlons still beat them out. Not to mention that in the other benchmark tests (IE: quake 3) are specially optmized for the Pentium. I give credit to the review in the fact that they are giving the honest results, but this is far from impressive coming from intel. It certainly won't want to make me buy a much more expensive Intel based system over Athlon for a few FPS in quake.
-Lance
eh, food for thought...
Err, that would be GiHz that's 2048, GHz is 2000. :)
--pi
Man, I get so sick of watching it nerds saying the only use for a faster processor is to 'scrape time from a kernel recompile'....
If you're like me, and you make music with computers, and try and do it entirely with real time apps such as Reaktor, Max/MSP, Supercollider, software synths in VST/Logic, faster processors make a big difference... as most people these days are limited purely by their processing power.
If someone gave me some mythical 10 Ghz machine, it would probably only take me a week or two to get used to that being the bottleneck....
i don't read slashdot anymore.
I'm not trying to crack on the benchmark, they made some very valid conclusions and of course very practical ones, but it's a mark of the chips, not the graphics architectures.
nforce has nothing to do with graphics (well, aside from its agp controller...). it's a motherboard chipset.
-
(as above)
That depends on the configuration. I've been watching the pc2100 512mb sticks go steadily down toward my price range, haven't seen a single uptick yet.
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
Everyone loves to talk about how much longer we can push Moore's Law, but no one seems to want to address the real issue--how much longer will demand for ever-faster PC's be high enough to fuel the ever-more-expensive development of those new CPU's? I think we're about to find out that Moore's Law was subvervient to the law of supply and demand all along.
Intel's other big problem is the IA64 and its hideous architecture that puts an amazing burden on compiler writers. Even worse, it's more than a little reminiscient of the IAPX-432 fiasco from a bunch of years ago, the last time Intel tried to introduce a spiffy, all-new architecture...
Rumor has it that Steve is going to pull out the big switcheroo. We'll see tomorrow I guess, but the rumor is that Apple is moving to Intel chips!
Even though it lost every benchmark except the Quake III one, and the 3DMark by a mere 2%. The small fact that DDR SDRAM is barely half the price of P4 ram, and the entire system is not nearly as expensive. They still recommend it for gamming? This is unabashed Intel hype. Not to mention all that wonderfull waste in the third ALU, poor design, and abysmal FPU performance. The P4 is a joke. Look at the performance improvements made by AMD when they moved to 0.13 micron. They improved the prefetch and release a truley better CPU. 'Intel - we inch forward - leaps and bounds and we could hurt ourselves!' The P4 has nearly twice the memory bandwith, >20% higher clock speed and it's still loosing benchmarks! Pathetic - utterly Pathetic.
Sorry - but I'm not buying Intel anytime soon.
Everyone is living in a personal delusion, just some are more delusional than others.
Does anyone besides me find it slightly disturbing that we now judge processors not only by the clock speed but also now by how far we can overclock them? It used to be overclocking was a hardware hack that only hardcore geeks did, just for fun and to squeeze a bit more out of their system. Now it's almost become standard, I can't wait to see do-it-yourself-EZ-Overclocking-kit bundled with overclocking for dummies on the store shelves. That and I really don't think 2 Ghz, espesialy from intel *gag* is a very good performance boost, even if the tests (which sorry to say can never simulate real life usage) show 10% more speed (only noticable if you push your CPU to the limmit, which mst of us don't do anyways). I'd prefer to see our current processors pushed all the way to their max before they redesign the processor.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
and how would that fit in with going boldy where no PC has gone before? Anyway, I use both PC and Mac workstations, and even our fastest PC (1600Mhz AthlonXP) only canes our fastest Mac (867Mhz MPC 7450) by around 10% on the kind of work we do, the G4s higher IPC and gert big Altivec units really get the Mac moving when exploited properly. Mind you, doing general purpose stuff like looking at Flash anims on a website, the Athlon seems to play 'em about twice as fast - so if you aren't actually WORKING the PC is the platform of choice...
That was classic intercourse!
1627545.12533 Gz (Gizyards)
1 Gz was how long it took King Arthur II to run around the table naked while being chased by dogs.
Here is a CNN Article about the chip.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
Well if I got anything out of reading the benchmarks, it's that AMD is dead on with their "Athlon XP 2000+" marketing game. I wasn't sure I liked the idea, after reading benchmarks where the 1.67 GHz AMD chip ran neck-and-neck with the 2.0 GHz Northwood, I have to concede that it seems accurate.
Bottom line? This might be healthy competition between AMD and Intel. Let's hope these two continue to push each other higher than they might climb on their own.
Hell even my k6-3+ here with quiet Arcticooler is doing 50% overclock. It's common practice to take (as low as 600) Tbirds and overclock them well over a gig with smaller coolers than needed for PIV (that's, like, almost a 100% overclock).
It's amazing how effective Intel's trick of reducing work per cycle in order to create more cycles continues to be. It seems like with every stepping, there's another idiotic slashdot item where everyone's like "holy shit, remember when 1GHz seemed huge!!!! Imagine beowulf!!! AMD's fucked now!!! Until this PIV came along I wasn't sure that technology in general was progressing at all, however now that we have x GHz I am assured that technology is advancing more rapidly than ever before!!!!"
I'd bet just about any amount of money that this "1.6GHz G4" is really a dual-800MHz G4 that someone (totally incorrectly) assumed was the same thing as a 1.6GHz processor.
interesting that they measure the fastest amd vs the 2nd fastest intel.
although, through extrapolation the amd would still be faster in most tests, i'm sure.
From the article:
The Northwood Pentium 4 processor chips we have are off-the-shelf chips, the same as any consumer would buy. No specially picked chips or engineering samples here, folks!
From CNN: (front page)
SAN FRANCISCO, California (Reuters) -- Intel Corp. on Monday will unveil its fastest-ever microprocessor, a Pentium 4 chip that not only allows it to maintain its leadership over rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc., but also introduces what analysts said is a critical improvement in Intel's memory chip technology.
I'm pretty hungover from last night but I'm still pretty sure today is Sunday.
How can they get off-the-shelf chips for testing when they're not available to the consumers yet?
---
Steve's got a much better chance creating a faster computer... He needs to bump up the 667 processers to 1.3 mHz in order to double his speed. Intel needs to manage a 3.6 GHz machine right now in order to double their chip.
The higher and higher ye get, the less the percentages work. 2.0GHz??? That's a nice 11%... The 233 from the 200 was bigger than that!
-Barkeep, a draft of your most hazardous brew, for the world is slowly stepping into focus, and I don't like what I see.
How far is the 0.13um process away from the "wall" where you get funky quantum effects happening on a chip? What will happen when we reach there? Could a box with a quantum processor be dangerous to cats?
It may be just be rumors right now, but very delicious ones :) ...
G5 = 64bit addressing PowerPC running about 1GHz to 1.6GHz = next Mac CPU (again, rumors, but still nice to dream)
And DDR333 in the next line of macs is probable from what I gather.
So until AMD brings out clawhammer and sledgehammer (of which I'm also waiting on) Macs may very well have some new advantages over PCs for a while.
If Apple's G4 had half of what the hype for it is, it would be twice as fast as it is now! Don't get me wrong, the G5 has some nice parts to it, but I don't expect it to be setting any records for raw speed by any stretch of the imagination. The raw computing power of the G4 is roughly comperable to an Athlon, clock for clock, and the G5 isn't likely to be any better (probably very slightly worse at equivalent clock speeds). Considering that it will only be coming in at ~1.5GHz by mid-year, that will put it as being about on-par with the slowest Celeron and Duron chips being sold at the time.
Steve Jobs does a great job of hype, and Mac OS X looks REAL nice, but really, when it comes to raw processing power, the G4 and G5 aren't the end-all be-all processors that many make them out to be. Anyone ever wondered why Apple/Motorola don't test these chips on ANY industry standard benchmarks, resorting only to some totally outdated "ByteMark" and the VERY easily manipulated Photoshop "benchmarks" (using the term loosely).
... with those who say "who cares."
What I'd rather see is flash memory, magnetic RAM, and other non-volatile memories, become dirt cheap for a few GBs worth and with a data path of 128bits at least and preferably more. And of course a processor that had a 128bit or higher data path would be a good compliment to it too.
Sadly though, I know increases in technology are incremental so that these are only dreams right now.
In the past 3 months, 4 of the 30 people in my work area have picked up DV cameras and looked at DVD burning their home vids. Every one of them has been greatly disappointed to find that they can't do it with their "old" 800MHz PIII boxen without leaving the job running over night.
So I guess the point is that you don't need much more power than currently available for raw compiles and such, but you can expect the upcoming flood of DVD burners and DV cameras to push a significant number of people to upgrade.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
With 2.2 GHz CPUs that all changes, every machine comes with a built in microwave.
Anyone know what effect the CPU has on 802.11b? Like might be tricky with both in the same box???
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Dude, if the MOV instruction is a load which doesn't hit cache, or a uncacheable store, it will take a heck of a lot more than 50 cycles to complete.
But it may still not carry enough horsepower to run my windows without crashing...
Well, that's just stupid. We know better. AMD would benefit if they named their chips according to the flops they can do. Once we got used to how those numbers looked, our instinctive drooling at the latest chip innovation would at least better mirror the actual usefulness of the chips. It would also result in us scratching our heads about why Intel released the P4 in the first place.
How exactly is the quality of the review in question off-topic? Presumably, the benchmarks and whatnot are all valid, but for me, anyway, when there are some pretty obvious errors in the text of an article, demonstrating that it probably hasn't had any sort of review or gone through any sort of editor, it raises some questions about the integrity of that article as a whole. Who is writing this, and why isn't anyone else reviewing it? I'd rather not make hardware purchasing decisions on the advice of an unprofessional hack who has never heard of proof-reading.
Maybe Intel gave a lot of you the bird personally, and if they did, I'm sorry, but as to the rest of the anti-intel crowd...
/Begin Rant
I'm sorry, but people time and time again keep naming the big price difference as a reason to buy AMD.
Here are a few facts to ponder: the 2.0A Northwood will be priced at around $360. The 2000+ Athlon will be priced at around $330. Yes, that's a huge price difference there. "Oh, but the (dirty) RAMBUS" you say. The price of a 256 meg stick of Corsair "Value Select" PC2100 DDR-DRAM PC2100 from www.memman.com is $98. The price of a 256 meg stick of Corsair "Value Select" 800mhz RDRAM is *gasp* $108. Assuming you want to outfit a rig with 512 megs of ram, that is a grand total of a $50 price difference. Maybe I'm just a little too loose with money, but on a $700+ purchase, I don't think $50 will make the ultimate decision. And I haven't even bothered to mention the fact that P4s can now use DDR...so what's the problem with price, again?
There seems to be a hatred of the P4 among some people. I really don't understand it. Yes, Intel made a tradeoff between per-clock power and ghz...but if they can make up for the difference with higher clock speed, so what? As I understand it, it's like the difference between buying a fast car that can't haul a lot of stuff and buying a van that can haul lots of stuff. Just so long as the fast car is able to go fast enough so it can make a few more trips (and thus transport the same amount) then it doesn't matter _how_ it got done. Also, continuing with the analogy, it seems the fast little car can go about 25% faster than its rated speed. According to most reviews, these overclock like a dream.
People who are against a product simply because it has the name "Intel" stamped on it are no better that IT departments that refuse to buy anything _not_ stamped with the Intel logo.
As is the mantra of capitalism, competition is good. However, for there to be competition, people can't just blindly stick to one brand. I'm not saying that the Northwoods are good enough to make someone switch, but they at least deserve a chance.
/End Rant.
Sorry all. I think it just needed to be said.
And check out the quote from the conclusion:
"In reality, the Northwood Pentium 4 is an amazingly fast processor. It's safe to say that as of right now, the Northwood at 2.0 GHz is a faster gaming processor in comparison to the 1.67 GHz (2000+) Athlon XP."
Now, what makes them say that? In Q3A the Norhtwood usually leads, but in RTCW, which is using the Q3A engine, the XP's consistently lead.
WTF gives? Anyone got an answer?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Actually, Tom's Hardware has a review of the 2.2 GHz Northwood and they compare it to the Athlon XP2000+.
e x. html
Looks like they just posted it.
Here's the link:
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q1/020107/ind
evanchik.net
LOL :)
:)
surely that would be 1627545 17/64 Gz though?
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
If I can't compile that horrendously large prog in 108 minutes instead of 120 minutes.
Personally I get the distinct impression Intel are just toying with AMD; they've already demonstrated the Northwood core at 3ghz, but if they were to release it right now they'd blow AMD away and loose their profit margins from 'early adopters'. It's in their interest to keep AMD going, in much the same way Microsoft kept Apple afloat. If there's a competitor then you can't be branded a monopoly.
At the moment though, I'll just have to get by with my 850mhz Celeron..
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
many question the need for 2.2ghz. i do.
getting a faster cpu nowadays is just because you need it and not that you want it. a celeron 300 system can do most basic functions such as doing word processing, spreadsheet, e-mail, internet.
the only reason you would need to get a p4 2.2ghz is that if you will be rendering 3d images (and look at now lightwave 7 exploits p4 and beats the heck out of athlon), doing more multimedia work (which is the main thrust of intel), and games (yes this is most probably the 99% reason why more cpu/gpu is needed). other than that, it will be totally useless.
but i'm impressed with the performance (and engineering) of the pentium 4. you can now render through divx at realtime a dvd movie with audio. and if you can engineer a software to use sse2 and all the pipelines of p4, look at the performance gain of lightwave (which was totally reengineered from the start.) so i bet most applications use only less than 30% of the cpu at any given time. i bet if they would reprogram their work and use 100% better, it will be running all your system something like pentium 4 4ghz!
btw, a few days ago, i was running a celeron 300a cpu and it worked great for me (until i had to replace the worn out motherboard so i upgraded to p3 733 - not even a p4.)
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
These Northwood CPUs are nice, but can the marginally higher Quake III performance justify nearly twice the cost of an Athlon XP? I would probably just rather spend my money on a dual Athlon MP machine.
Besides... Quake III is optimized around Intel, as are all id games.
It has been said before: there are benchmarks and lies. What we need is a bench mark for system responsiviness. But i haven't seen this yet. But there are a few things that give you a clue we need a good test for this :
-There are lots of remarks the new linux kernel feels unresponsive, but in the benchmarks it test better than ever before. There is a low-latency patch that did not make it because there is not clear test this helps.
-I know a PC with 256 MB ram responds better than a pc with 128 MB ram from experience (i.e. MS word starts up faster) But in the test this not very visible.
-A stutter in the sound is written of to bad drivers, but is very annoying. Is there any test for this? (other then just listen to a mp3)
Then you obviously haven't looked at the prices in the last week or so
I was under the impression that an overclocked CPU usually ran rather flaky with spurious crashes and lockups
It's much worse than that. Every individual CPU reacts differently. The errors range from simple incorrect results to crashes. Remember the FDIV problem a few years ago where there were certain bit patterns that resulted in answers that were a little off? Well overclocking sometimes results in similar problems, except you don't know the conditions that will result in incorrect results.