Disappointing inaccuracies in TomsHardware P4 3.4 review

[Zap]

As you know, the Pentium 4 Prescott is Intel's third generation Pentium 4 core. The first, code name Willamette, became popular due to its performance advantage over the last Pentium III Tualatin while consuming much more power.

Performance advantage over Tualatin? Isn't it supposed to be "performance and stability advantage over Coppermine on i820 chipset board?" I thought the Tualatin came out a bit later, maybe when Northwoods were available. I don't consider the Tualatin 1.4GHz 512k cache Pentium III chip to be at much of a disadvantage to even a Willamette 2GHz with RAMBUS. The Willamette became popular because of the fiasco with the i820 chipset and unstable high-end Coppermines, plus Intel's marketing machine pushing the GHz mantra.

We already had several Northwood processors that smoothly got along when clocked at 4 GHz, with only conventional CPU coolers.

Huh? "Conventional CPU coolers" to me would be air cooling. How common is hitting over 3.8GHz on air? Even high end Thermaltake/heatpipe/Tornado fan combos? Though common, I don't consider water cooling "conventional" and certainly vapor-phase is in a world of its own.

I'm gonna segue into a general complaint about web reviews. Now, I recall reading in the past about web site journalists not being admitted to press events because they weren't considered "real" journalists. While I disagree with that as a whole, I do think there is some merit to that viewpoint. I see two issues...

First is editing. Too many web sites have inaccuracies, misspellings, bad grammar and other such irregularities that you would not find in traditional media such as newspapers and magazines. TomsHardware (as well as MANY many other sites) is guilty of this. While I feel it may be in part due to the nature of the article authors not being native English speakers, as a serious and large scale site I would imagine that they would hire an editor who's job is to make sure all the T's are crossed and all I's dotted. Though I've singled out TomsHardware, I've seen other news/review sites that have been much worse.

Second is integrity. I'm talking about just plain honesty, such as not being pressured into giving good reviews to bad products by the manufacturer. I'm talking about the lack of value of some gibberish that is passed off as a "review." A description, few pictures and a "I conclude this is a great product" does NOT make a review. An "overview" or "preview" maybe, but not a review.

Anyways, despite the flaws, I still visit TomsHardware. Just wanted to get that off my chest.

 

[Soulkeeper]

yeah maybe tom was tired when he wrote that one
haha

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: Soulkeeper
yeah maybe tom was tired when he wrote that one
haha

I'm thinking he was drunk, like he usually is, or he wouldn't always be writing the trash he writes!