Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz: Does the prophecy hold true?

Final Words

When we first reviewed the Pentium 4, the conclusion was simple: don’t be early adopters.  However today, the picture has changed quite a bit.  The Pentium 4’s prices have or are in the process of dropping significantly, and the price of RDRAM has declined as well.  The processor is now clocked 200MHz higher than when we first looked at it, and we also have new benchmarks to truly stress the platform as well as its competitors (SYSMark 2001 and Benchmark Studio).  The real question is, have our recommendations changed? 

The recommendations themselves haven’t changed, but now we can make much more specific suggestions as to what route you should consider.  Quite possibly the most useful benchmark in defining what type of user you are would be SYSMark 2001.  If you find yourself the type of person that is encoding a video file while working on editing an image and a video, switching to a web design application, putting together a demo in Flash and other types of scenarios like that then the Pentium 4 is more suited for your usage style.  If you are this type of a user then you do demand the greater amounts of bandwidth that the Pentium 4’s cache, FSB and memory bus can offer.  Be prepared to pay a premium over an Athlon, but at least you are getting greater performance for it.

The next category described by SYSMark 2001 is the Office Productivity user.  Interestingly enough it seems like many users will fall into this category as it doesn’t only refer to those that run MS Word all day but those that are surfing the net while checking their mail and scanning for viruses, unzipping files, and other such tasks.  In this case, while the Pentium 4’s performance is respectable, the Athlon is king especially because of its lower cost.  

In terms of gaming performance, the current standings are producing mixed results.  In some situations (Quake III Arena, MBTR) the Pentium 4 is dominating, while in others it is tying (Serious Sam) or lagging behind the Athlon (UnrealTournament).  We will have to wait until more games are available that we can test in order to make a solid conclusion for the gamer, however you really can’t go wrong with either setup as far as things stand today.

The Constant Computing performance of both platforms seems to be a draw as well.  At 1.7GHz for the Pentium 4 and at 1.33GHz for the Athlon you’re going to get the highest levels of performance you or your company can buy.  It is mainly an issue of cost, upgradeability, reliability and what other tasks you will be doing that will factor into the decision here. 

As far as conventional x87 FP applications are concerned, as well as those scientific applications that aren’t extremely memory bandwidth dependent, the Athlon does continue to hold the advantage because of its superior FPU.  Although SSE2’s 64-bit SIMD-FP capabilities may change that, we have yet to see evidence of that and probably won’t for quite some time to come.

In closing, Northwood (0.13-micron Pentium 4) is still on the way, AMD’s Palomino core is going to be hitting the streets hopefully in a couple of months, so the ideal recommendation is to wait of course.  Obviously for many this isn’t an option, in which case the above recommendations should help steer you in the right direction.  Another option to consider is a cheap intermediate upgrade to tide you over until the Palomino and Northwood are readily available and upgrade again later.

And just when you thought things had quieted down, they went ahead and got interesting again.