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

Eye-opening?

[spge]

I had a job keeping my eyes open at all, reading that over-long, poorly structured article with no useful conclusion.

Where's the P4 vs. Modern CPUs conclusion ?

[MasJ]

Isn't this what the article summary gets at ? I couldn't find anywhere in the conclusion how the P4 actually compares to present day processors.
I'm not about to read through 17 pages of all of that just to open my eyes.

Oh, and for CPU comparisons, I usually use:
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php

It's quite reliable for my choices. I just need everything to boil down to a number these days. Too much choice out there. Was simpler when you could just look at Ghz and know which is better. Now a P7700 and T8600 (examples I just made up..) could be at the same clock speed, be called Core 2 Duo and have totally different performance numbers. Confusing!

Re:Games don't use multiple cores?

[Brian Feldman]

Because not everyone has multiple cores so PC games have to go for some version of the lowest common denominator

      Which is honestly quite strange, because most games I know require you have the latest uber-$500 graphics card to run properly. I would argue that there is something else involved (eye candy important, multi-core not) in the design process.

You need your hyperbole license revoked until you can use some semblance of realism. BioShock 2 literally came out less than a week ago and it runs at a full 60fps at 1920x1080, all graphics settings at their highest, on a Radeon 4870 -- a $200 graphics card when I got it a YEAR ago.