It's quite amazing how far the Pentium 4 has come in the last three years. I still remember a time when the original Williamette Socket 423 Pentium 4 1.5 GHz processor made its first debut. Despite all the "large numbers", performance of the CPU was actually pretty absymal when compared to AMD's solutions at the time.
My oh my how times have changed. We're up past 3GHz, a number which is pretty phenomenal considering the first computer many of us used in the 486 days was clocked at just 33MHz. In any event, a history of the Intel processor is not what we're about to embark upon. Instead we are going to be testing out the newest chip, the hottest thing since sliced bread if you listen to Intel in fact - enter the 800MHz FSB Intel Pentium 4 3GHz Northwood Socket 478 processor.
pentium 4's were originally clocked at 1.5 GHz with 256KB L2 cache and running on a 400 MHz FSB, now the top of the line CPU from the men in blue runs at 3 GHz and comes packing 512KB of L2 cache. Based on the same Northwood core that was released way back in January of 2002, the P4 3.0C (as it is known in the geek circles) is a force to be reckoned with. While the AthlonXP 3200+ gives the P4 3.0C a good run for its money, the P4 is slightly faster in the end as you'll see.
FULL STORY @ PCSTATS (http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1403)
