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Tom's Hardware Does Pentium 4

BFG10K

BFG10K

Lifer
Tom has done a cracker of a review on the Pentium 4. It's much more detailed and technically informed then the other "run the benchmarks" reviews. He even managed to run overclocked models in the benchmarks (highest 1.73 GHz, and it got 233 FPS in Quake 3!).

I think the Pentium 4 will do much better when optimising compilers are out for it and are used to re-compile the test benches for. Also when Intel start using DDR RAM instead of RDRAM that will probably help them price-wise and performance-wise.

Tom's Hardware
 
That's a nice little overclock.🙂

Oooo just imagine how nice a .13um die with copper interconnects would overclock. Then again, Tom was probably chipset/bus rather than chip limited.
 
it's grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreat

seriously i dont see what the whole I Hate Dr. Tom thing is, he does good reviews and this one is better than most that are out there today.
 
Quote from Tom:


<< 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. -snip- >>


:Q :Q
 
Hey, isn't that some pretty nice &quot;power point&quot; graphic block diagram too! Thanks Tom! 🙂

Then again, it's expected of him, when something &quot;THIS&quot; new comes out, he REALLY does a MASSIVE article detailed as hell in them... Great article!
 
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks Tom's Hardware is a great site. I've seen people bash him for somehow being biased, yet I don't see any evidence of this anywhere. His articles are thorough and informative. There's a good reason why his website is the most read PC hardware site on the internet.

Those CPU block diagrams were very impressive and informative.
 
I believe that Tom was definitly bias twards AMD in this article. Well.....not necessarily bias twards AMD but he did alot of Intel bashing. Like when he underclocked the P4 and it preformed worse than the P3. Or when he explained the problems with RDRAM:


<< 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! >>


His article was very thorough and informative.
 


<< Like when he underclocked the P4 and it preformed worse than the P3 >>



That doesn't strike me as bashing Intel. In fact, I am quite pleased that he did do this benchmark. It seems to me as though underclocking to spec against a PIII (a chip a generation below the PIV) is something that should have been done in all reviews. It lets us gauge this 'next generation' chip against the chips of olden. In this case, the result was that the chips of olden (had they been able to ramp) would have been faster than the PIV. Now we know.

How is that bashing?
 
I also thoroughly enjoyed the underclocking 1.2Ghz P4 vs. the DDR 1.2Ghz AMD...
Great article Tom, and Anand's article is awesome too... not quite as impressed by the [H] but i love that site for the frequent updates and grating humor :]
 
Tom's Never been Biased, he's just a Hardcore critic. And Intel is always opening themselves up for criticism.

I like this line though... And I hold him true to it.

<<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. >>

That just says it all! 🙂
 
I'd say of all the reviews I seen of the P4, Anands shows the most negative bias towards Intel. Going on for a full page on how Intel can't do anything right while AMD seems to be doing everything right but failing to mention that Intel sells every processor it can make regardless if it has lost the &quot;performance crown&quot; and sell it's chips for more than AMD sells it's chips which from a business point of view(yes, Intel is a business) seems to be the right thing to do. Of course, hardware freaks want fast chips on the cheap so AMD is the way to go for them, it's just hardware freaks and performance enthusiast are a distinct minority in the large term scale of things, In fact, both Intel and AMD are having a hard time selling their flagship CPU's not through any fault of them, it's just most folks don't need a 1GHz+ CPU but that's another story.
BFG10K,
If you read the specs, you will see that DDR memory will never give the P4 a performance advantage. Faster processors demand higher memory bandwidths, by the time a Intel compatible DDR chipset is available, P4's will be in the 1.7-2Ghz range and those processors will need more memory bandwidth than DDR can provide. OK QDR(quad data rate) memory is on the horizon or on the drawing board so to speak but it will be too late for Intel as well.
The saving grace of Rambus is more channels can be added without sending pin counts through the roof, DDR memory has more pins than SDR ram which make adding more channels difficult which limits scalability.

Personally I could care less as all the new stuff is too expensive(Rambus or not) for me to consider right now. Maybe in a year from now you can by a cheap 1.5GHz P4 and overclock it to 2.1GHz or something, time will tell.
 
I liked Toms and Anands review. Both had its points and both had good info. I didn't like Hardocps at all. Since when is high priced subperformance what hardocp is about?
 
I never understood why people bash Tom either, his reviews don't really strike me as touting skewed information, actually he has one of the more comprehensive benchmarks I have seen.

Probably just because some people are ignorant and jump on the bandwagon... &quot;Don't quote me anything off that site, he's biased and he suxx!!!!&quot;.

Oh well, some people have no opinions of their own.

 
Most of it is probabaly leftovers from the period that he was extremely nVidia biased, and his somewhat insulting statements about Brian Hook.
He got bashed pretty hard for a whort while there, but I do think he deserved it at the time, but IMO thats forgiven and forgotten by now.
 
I respect Toms reviews 100%, he is straigh and honest. Also he can be blunt and thats what I love about his reviews. He tells it how it is, and alot of times that pisses people off.

Anands was a pretty good review too.

Sharkys was a typical Intel ass kissing Sharky article.
 
Before i read Aceshardware's review, I thought Tomshardware did the BEST review, hell much better than most other sites, including Anands. I dont understand why people bash tom, what i find him is that he has the guts to give out comments many sites decide not to give.
 
I recall the Q3 benchmarking thing that Sunner is referring to. The funny part is that Toms numbers pretty much held up after a &quot;fixed&quot; Q3 timedemo was released.

Tom's reviews are fine, although he is a little bit too, umm, anti-American. And he likes to put pictures of himself up.
 
I like the great variaty of benchmarks in the review of Ace's Hardware! It's by far the best P4-review out there! 😉
Of course, Anand's was pretty good to!
 
I personally have found Tom's reviews more useful than Anands in the past, particularly on CPUs, and the way Tom uses graphs.
Prefer the forums here thought, Tom's has naff design and the people there can't even spell.
 
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