Today's Best CPUs Compared... To a Pentium 4

Dr. Damage writes "How do current $74 CPUs compare to the $133 ones? To exclusive $1K Extreme Editions? Interesting questions, but what if you took a five-year-old Pentium 4 at 3.8GHz and pitted it against today's CPUs in a slew of games and other applications? The results are eye-opening." Note that this voluminous comparison is presented over 18 pages with no single-page view in sight.

Comments

P4 pride

[dushkin]

I'm at work, where I have a P4 winXP machine.

AND I'M PROUD OF IT.

Re:P4 pride

[MrNaz]

I bought 5 surplus P4 machines with 512mb ram and 40gb HDDs for my community center's library. They have *CRT* monitors. Beat that!

Re:P4 pride

[Shadow of Eternity]

My gaming setup used to be two computers (pentium4 and a q9450) both hooked up to dual-input FW9012 and P260 trinitron CRTs. That was two computers both running at 3500x1200 and putting a combined weight of about 300lbs on my desk.

We almost didn't need to heat the apartment in winter.

Re:P4 pride

[silent_artichoke]

(Obviously she doesn't access the Internet)

Reading that made my arms itch like a junkie without a fix.

Re:Games don't use multiple cores?

[h00manist]

Are games so lazily programmed that they don't take advantage of that either?

Obviously it's not exactly easy to make programs that can run either on multiple cpu's or a single one just as well.

Re:Games don't use multiple cores?

[SharpFang]

Goddamnit Dwarf Fortress. It could really, really use multiple cores to handle physics. A good enemy flooding system based on a dam and an artificial lake will hog the fastest CPU.

Re:Games don't use multiple cores?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, you're right, it's all really about having multiple threads in your soft. All these deadlocks, stravations and races blahs are just there to frighten kiddies!

Re:Mod parent up

[swordgeek]

"Or use Btrfs; ZFS isn't the only option with integrity checks."

Oh yeah, because nothing screams "reliable" like filesystem that is still in beta.

Re:Games don't use multiple cores?

[Lord Ender]

Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2 both have options to use multiple cores. I believe that, when enabled, the other cores to "physics processing." My understanding is that "physics processing" is geek-speak for "making the bodies of your slain foes collapse into realistic piles of death as they hit the ground."