IaPup that was very well thought out and fair reply's. I'm not recomending the P-4 yet either.
I will have to admit I just read anandtech's review and was very dismayed. Than I read Tom's and became very enlightened. I'm not about to go out and buy one and never had any thoughts to that end. But I do beleive I will have one before the end of next year. the numbers from alot of the benchmark to say the least suck but I think most of you guy's need to read between the lines. The P-4 is the future and so is Rdram. I copied and pasted a bunch of things from both reviews that caught my eye. So here they are !!
Quotes from Anandtech Review
?In spite of using the same memory controller as the i840 chipset, the Pentium 4 on the i850 chipset holds a 75% performance advantage over even the fastest AMD 760 DDR platform.?
?However it is hard to believe that the AMD 760's 266MHz bus isn't enough to do at least the same.?
?The only remaining explanation points us in the direction of the Pentium 4's architecture itself. As you're sure to see in benchmarks floating around, the Pentium 4 will do quite well in SPECfp_2000?
?A major factor for the Pentium 4's performance will be the 400MHz bus, especially as games increase in complexity and the amount of data being sent to and from the CPU increases.?
Quotes from Tom?s Hardware
?Many of the overclockers of this world were afraid that Pentium 4's quad-pumped 100 MHz bus would make bus overclocking of this processor as difficult and restrictive as with Athlon and its dual-pumped 133/100 MHz-bus. I can bring you the surprisingly positive news that Pentium 4 is as overclockable as Intel processors always have been. You can imagine that the multiplier of official Pentium 4 processors will be locked, but with a good P4-motherboard you won't have any problems overclocking the bus.
I took advantage of the jumperless-mode of the Asus P4T-motherboard and managed to let two different Pentium 4 processors run at up to 125 MHz bus clock. I even included a 1.4 GHz Pentium 4 overclocked to 14 x 115 MHz = 1610 MHz as well as the evaluation 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 overclocked to 16 x 108 MHz = 1728 MHz in the benchmark results. I only had to raise the voltage from 1.7 to 1.8 V. There was no thermal issue, as Pentium 4 heat sinks are already designed for much higher heat dissipation than what current Pentium 4 processors are actually able to produce.?
?Although Intel claims that Pentium 4 has the worlds best floating point performance we know that in reality the normal FPU of Pentium 4 is hardly even able to live up to Pentium III standards. Only floating point applications that use SSE2 could possibly support Intel's bold claim. Today's standard software is obviously not yet SSE2-optimized, so that standard FPU-intensive software will probably run rather slow on Pentium 4 systems.?
This is what Tom say?s about sysmark 2000
?What does this result mean to us? Not much really. Office applications haven't been a challenge to any of the processors that were released within the last 12 months?
?The lead of Pentium 4 is reduced but not lost when it's running the complex NVIDIA NV15-level. The processor needs to compute a whole lot of FP-stuff and so far Quake 3 doesn't take any advantage of SSE2. Still, Pentium 4 is looking good?
?You might remember the recent article about AMD's 760 chipset. I wrote that I consider the MPEG4-test the overall most important processor benchmark, because the scores in this benchmark make a really noticeable difference to the computer user. We are talking of hours of waiting that can be saved with a well performing processor.
I bet that Intel loves this benchmark, because Pentium 4 performs really well here. Even the slowest Pentium 4 is able to beat the competitor from Sunnyvale.
This result shows what Pentium 4 was designed for. It seems that Intel is taking more care of 3D-gamers and DVD-Rippers than of office workers. Pentium 4 doesn't want to be working class?
?You can see that the memory speed does indeed have a major impact on all the benchmark results except of the 3D Studio Max scores. In some cases the difference between the slowest and the fastest score is more than 10%! This proves clearly that Pentium 4 lives from the high memory bandwidth that RDRAM is finally able to deliver. Keep that in mind in case someone wants to sell you PC600 RDRAM!?
Toms remarks ??.
?Intel seems very determined to make Pentium 4 a success and I have the feeling that it will succeed. The implementation of SSE2-instructions into future software as well as the usage of code-optimizing compilers for Pentium 4 will make sure that Pentium 4 will be standing in a much better light very soon. However, I believe that Pentium 4's strongest side is its clock speed potential. Just realize that I overclocked this brand new 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 to beyond 1.7 GHz without any problems. I don't care whatever the latest roadmap of Intel may be saying. I am certain that Intel will deliver very fast Pentium 4 processors very soon. Intel has finally won back the ability to make AMD's life a lot harder.
What do I think of the components around Pentium 4? I have got to admit it, but with Pentium 4 Rambus is finally able to deliver for the first time. If you look at Pentium 4's design closely enough, you can see that it's engineered to live with RDRAM in perfect harmony. The memory benchmarks from above show that Pentium 4 really requires the 3,200 MB/s of data bandwidth supplied by the two Rambus channels. I doubt that it will perform as well with DDR-SDRAM, unless two channels will be used. One DDR-SDRAM channel offers 'only' 2,122 MB/s of data bandwidth, which might make quite a difference with Pentium 4.
The new power supply and housing requirements for Pentium 4 might be a nuisance to some, but they make perfect sense. I hope that AMD will follow Intel's example and come up with some solid new specifications for Athlon-platforms as well.
I personally really like Pentium 4. It's a bit like getting designer furniture. You don't really need it, but it's damn cool to have it. Don't buy Pentium 4 unless you feel like this. If you can spend the extra bucks and like the strengths of Pentium 4 without minding the little weaknesses (e.g. x87 floating point applications) you maybe want to consider it. If you are on a budget or your system is a hard working platform that's required to make you money, I'd rather go for the really working class kind of processor by the name of Athlon.
Pentium 4 at 1.4 GHz goes for $644, Pentium 4 at 1.5 GHz costs $819 right now. It's not exactly a bargain, but, hey, who really cares about price if it really is all about style?
Now guys look at more than the numbers and you will see why I say the P-4 is going to steam roll over the Athlon.