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Intel's Pentium 4 3.4GHz Processors Reviewed

Posted by timothy on from the boy-are-my-lips-tired dept.

EconolineCrush writes "In one of the most gratuitous benchmarking indulgences I've seen, Tech Report has tested Intel's new Northwood and Prescott Pentium 4 3.4GHz processors against sixteen competitors ranging from the relatively old school Athlon XP to the opulent Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, with plenty of Athlon 64 action thrown in for good measure. Performance is tested in a wide range of applications, including gaming, rendering, image processing, media encoding, speech recognition, and scientific number crunching. Even if you're not interested in Intel's latest Pentium 4s, the review nicely shows where 18 of the fastest desktop chips from AMD and Intel stack up against each other."

3 of 226 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Speed by nacturation · · Score: 5, Insightful

    While all that processor speed is mighty good, who needs top-of-the-line equipment anymore? The new games all rely on the GFX card rather than the CPU. Any suggestions, other than the fact that Intel is keeping up to Moore's law?

    Many non-game apps are CPU bound, and speed is always desired in these situations. Examples include rendering, video compression, SETI@Home, etc. Likely you don't need a faster processor, but it doesn't mean that the business world sees it the same way. Heck, maybe some day these processors will power your graphics card too!

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  2. Re:Nice In-Place Ad by nacturation · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Planting an obvious ad in the middle of "journalism" is just wrong.

    I don't see anything wrong about it. Imagine if you ran a tech review site and couldn't afford to equip all your various test machines with gigs of RAM each. Wouldn't you approach a company and ask if they could perhaps donate (or at least loan) you the equipment you needed? And, if they did such a thing, wouldn't it be nice to credit them for helping you out?

    I fail to see how this is a "plant". It would be suspect if this were a review of sound cards and, right in the middle of the article, it said "Hey, your system needs more memory... purchase Corsair RAM today!" then that would be a plant. It would be no different than somebody comparing operating systems and thanking IBM/Dell/whoever for loaning you the equipment to do a side-by-side comparison with realtime parameter tweaking rather than having to tediously reformat a single machine every time you want to test a new config.

    It's the lost art of the professional "thank you".

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  3. Unbiased journalism by pwagland · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Now, sure, we don't expect these people to be totally unbiased, but where did they pull this from?:
    The Pentium 4 'E' is an absolute monster in workstation graphics, capturing the top spot in three of the six tests and tying for it in one more. In the other two, the Prescott 3.4GHz is second only to the Athlon 64 FX-53.
    By the way, that test that it tied? It tied it with the Athlon 64 FX-53. But then I guess they wouldn't get their advertising budget if they said:
    The Pentium 4 'E' and Athlon 64 FX-53 are roughly equal in workstation graphics, with the P4E winning three of the six tests the A64 FX-53 winning two, and they tied one test. Overall though there was less than 2% difference in any test.