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

Heat and Overclocking

The Pentium 4 1.7GHz on-die thermal diode provided temperature readings close to that of our Athlon 1.33GHz.  However, as you will know, the Athlon does not have an on-die thermistor to provide truly accurate core temperature readings but what we can conclude from this is that the Pentium 4 at 1.7GHz is running cooler than the Athlon at 1.33GHz since the latter has a nearly equivalent temperature measured outside of the core which is relatively cool compared to the on-die temperature. 

During our tests the Pentium 4 1.7GHz always operated at 1.7GHz and did not fall victim to any clock throttling because of heat.  You shouldn’t worry about the Pentium 4 dropping its clock speed because of heat unless you are running the processor without a heatsink/fan installed. 

Unfortunately we weren’t able to conduct any overclocking tests on our 1.7GHz Pentium 4 sample since we are waiting for BIOS updates from a few motherboard manufacturers for proper recognition of the processor first.  Only the Intel 850 and MSI 850 boards had publicly available BIOSes with 1.7GHz support at the time of publication and thus we limited our tests to those two platforms which performed within 1% of one another.