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Pentium4 Aftermath
Steve Gibson
139
Here comes the aftermath of the Pentium4 release. The CPU seems to have bombed under the scrutiny of most of the hardware reviewers with the exception of a few. Tomshardware had a review which was optimistic though. Guess what, he changed his mind almost entirely. (Thanks Saeger) It looks like the MPEG benchmarks were flubbed a bit and the P4 is slower at that too. Here's the quick recap:

- Pentium 4 runs current office applications slower than Pentium 3 and much slower than AMD's Athlon
- Pentium 4 scores worse than Athlon in Unreal Tournament.
- Pentium 4 is a very bad solution for compilations with gcc 2.95.2 under Linux.
- Pentium 4 scores very badly in 3D Studio Max , proving a sub-par FPU.
- Pentium 4 gets slightly beaten by Athlon in the 3D game MDK2.
- Pentium 4 is currently the most expensive x86-system solution available.
- Pentium 4 scores very badly in MPEG4 encoding benchmarks
- BUT Pentium 4 is really good at Quake 3 Arena! Honestly!

That last one combined with the word that the P4 can scale up to something like 5GHz or so is about the only saving grace for the CPU at this point.

Steve Gibson is the cofounder of Shacknews.com. Originally known as sCary's Quakeholio back in 1996, Steve is now President of Gearbox Publishing after selling Shacknews to GameFly in 2009.

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