There's no doubt that the Intel Pentium 4 3.0C is an extremely fast processor. However with a
retail price of $566 CDN ($420 US)
in these fiscally tight times it's also one of the most expensive CPU's on the
market and out of reach of many who are on a budget.
Still, if you demand top of the line performance it should be a given
that you would have to pay top of the line money.
Because the Prescott core will not be released till Q4 2003 or later (more likely early next year) raising the FSB
from 533 to 800 MHz was a logical move. It was originally supposed to
make a pit-stop at the 667MHZ FSB level, but we all know that never happened. In any
case the jump to 800MHz FSB has allowed Intel to maintain their performance lead
over arch rival AMD.
HyperThreading has a lot of potential and we're happy to see that Intel
enabled HyperThreading on the slower P4's running 200 MHz FSB. Other then the
higher FSB and HyperThreading though there are no differences between the new P4
C based processors or the earlier Northwoods.
In terms of overclocking the P4 3.0C does not disappoint,
with the MSI 875P Neo-FIS2R we were limited to 230 MHz FSB but we have hit 235
MHz+ on some other motherboards currently being tested and that's with only air cooling. With water, TEC or phase
change, 4 GHz+ overclocking numbers should be possible with of this chip (you
could kill your chip if you try this though).
I understand that I'm not a normal Pentium 4 user but I
still think the pins on the bottom of the processor are too weak. They bend
quite easily and I wish Intel would do something to reinforce them a bit. The tweaker/overclocker out there definitely knows what I'm talking about and it
would do wonders for peace of mind... but enough on that. If you want the fastest
x86 processor on the planet, you definitely will not be disappointed by
the Pentium 4 3.0C! Buy it, love it, cherish it, and then overclock the heck
out of it!
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Related
Articles
Here are a few other articles that you might enjoy
as well...
1. The Basics of HyperThreading: What is it?
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