SUMMARY: Today we have each of the Intel Pentium 4 amigos under the spotlight. We compare Northwood (P4C), Gallatin (P4EE) and Prescott (P4E) against each other and discuss compatibility issues with P4E and which processor is your best choice.
Pentium 4, without a doubt has become the most evolving technology for Intel Corporation. It started out as the next generation of CPU and it has now evolved to the point of totally insane clock speeds with the latest in fabrication technologies.
The Pentium 4 has not had as great a run as Intel would have liked. Unlike the AMD Athlon CPU, the Pentium 4 wasn’t welcomed with open arms by OEM’s or retail users when it was first released - Why? Simply put cost and performance.
The Intel Pentium 4 on release would cost you $800 for a 1.4GHz Pentium 4 CPU itself, added to this the price of a motherboard based on the only chipset avalible, the 850 and you had around $300 extra. Then came the final insult, 850 was designed for one memory technology only, RDRAM - the most expensive memory type available.
Now if this wasn’t enough to put you off then we had the performance reviews. With results of the Pentium III 1GHz destroying the P4 1.4GHz, and AMD Athlon CPUs simply blowing the Pentium 4 away, the P4 was avoided like the plague.
Intel’s agreements with RAMBUS at the time prevented any production or official support for any DDR based memory, which Intel itself has discredited as a low performance alternative to RDRAM. It wasn’t until RDRAM agreements were abolished that Intel put its faith in DDR, and hasn’t it come a long way. Intel has had five chipsets alone based on single channel DDR memory and four based on the Dual Channel Memory DDR. With these advancements we have seen core advancements go hand in hand. Intel’s first core, Willamette, was more of the test subject, with users purchasing them as last resorts. It wasn’t until Northwood entered the scene that the Intel Pentium 4 took off, especially in the overclockers market. Since the Northwood we have had two new cores grace the front papers - the Gallatin or better known as the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition and the Prescott or the Pentium 4E as it is also known.
Today we have got our hands on the Northwood, Gallatin and Prescott CPU’s all clocked at 3.2GHz. Today we crown the winner of the Pentium 4 Architectures whilst put up against both of AMD’s top dogs.
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