Intel Pentium 4 1700MHz
(1.7GHz) Review
Our last
look on the Pentium 4 Processor goes back in November of 2000. I can still
feel the Hype that was going on for this upcoming beast that debuted at a
whooping 1400MHz and 1500MHz just days after COMDEX 2000 (Las-Vegas). The
date was the 20th of November, the day when the NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement)
broke and the very first reviews started appearing on the Internet.
The debut unfortunately
didn't quite go as Intel would have expected. Intel's latest Flagship ended
in deep trouble with the reviewers/critics all over the world. Believe it
or not but the P4 in most of the everyday home/office tasks performed worse
than its older brother the Pentium III running at lower speed. A Pentium III
Unit running at 1000MHz (1GHz) using SDRAM memory was able to manage better
in most office/home tasks than the mighty P4 running at 1500MHz (1.5GHz) using
the expensive RDRAM memory. Sure the Pentium 4 had its positive sides in specific
multimedia/3D tasks but explaining why the Pentium4 was loosing in Office/Home
benchmarks over the Pentium III system that coasted over 3 times less to built
was rather…well…not easy.
|
Features
|
The
Processor
|
- NetBus Architecture
- 400MHz System
Bus
- Advanced Transfer
Cache
- Advanced Dynamic
Execution
- Hyper Pipelined
Technology (20)
- Rapid Execution
Cache
- Multi Media (SSE)
- Enhanced Floating
Point
- Operates on Intel's
850 Chipset
- Available in
1.3, 1.4 and 1.5GHz versions.
|
|
In the conclusion
of our original 1.5GHz review, I've pointed out some facts that I found important
for Intel to fallow in order to give further interested to their new product.
My biggest concern was the cost of the Pentium 4, a very high cost that is.
My second point was the technology behind it. The P4 was criticized for lots
of performance related reasons; this wasn't always leading to poor design
but mostly to poor software (code) support available. The NetBurst architecture
wasn't (isn't in most scenarios) quite able "just" yet to take full
advantage of the available Software/Games resulting in an average and in some
cases lower average performance. Our third concern was the RDRAM monopoly.
A monopoly because the P4 had/has nothing else to run on that RDRAM (RAMBUS)
memory on a 850 chipset. As you already know, RDRAM always was and still is
priced somewhat higher than SDRAM/DDR memory putting it out of reach for the
majority.
In this article we look
at Intel's 1700MHz Pentium 4 part. 1700MHz already...can you believe it? Without
predicting my conclusion to this article I can already tell you that Intel
has done a great job on working a major point, the cost! And as Intel pushes
the speed of the P4, this processor gets more and more interesting.
