COMMENTARY--Despite Intel's best efforts, today's unveiling of the fastest Pentium 4 yet doesn't have quite the suspense of a Hitchcock movie. After all, the so-called Northwood processor--a leaner, meaner version of the P4 chip--has actually been available at lower clock speeds since early January.
But the announcement of the new 2.4GHz Northwood P4 is not without some drama. Intel has been claiming for years that the P4 was designed with lots of room to grow. Based on the results of our lab tests of two of the first systems to use the 2.4GHz chip, from Dell and HP, it looks like P4 is all grown up.
BEFORE WE GIVE you the tale of the tape, it's worth explaining what exactly Intel announced today--and what it is reportedly preparing to announce in coming weeks. Since Northwood processors have actually been around for a couple of months at the same clock speeds as non-Northwood chips, Intel started appending the letter "A" to the former to distinguish between the two. For example, a 2.20A GHz P4 is the smaller, faster Northwood variety.
Next month, Intel will release a slew of new chip sets that offer better-integrated graphics, faster bus speed, support for USB 2.0, and other features, according to news reports. All this should only help add to the mess AMD made when it started numbering its chips based on their performance rather than their actual clock speed.
But what Intel may have missed in marketing, it is making up for in performance. The Dell Dimension 8200 and HP Pavilion 950, both equipped with the new 2.4GHz P4, are the fastest desktop systems ever tested in our lab, period. In fact, they are the first systems we've ever tested to break 200 frames per second on Quake III Arena--thanks to a big assist from the new 128MB Nvidia Ti 4600 graphics card.
OVERALL, THE DIMENSION 8200 took top honors, thanks to its 512MB RDRAM (not to mention a hard drive with an unusually large cache), versus 512MB of DDR SDRAM in the Pavilion 950. Then again, at $2,409, the Pavilion 950 (with its 120GB drive, 15-inch LCD display, and CD-RW and DVD drives) costs $270 less than the Dimension 8200 with a similar configuration except for the 19-inch display. (A 15-inch flat-panel monitor would add another $130 to the system price, making the HP Pavilion 950 $400 cheaper.)
Both systems compared favorably to the fastest Athlon XP+ systems, and in some areas we're really starting to see the P4 pull away from the pack, especially on the Internet Content Creation portion of the newest benchmark in our lab--SysMark 2002.
There are a variety of possible explanations for this, including a larger 512K cache, and alleged P4 optimizations in Adobe Photoshop. But the bottom line is that if you regularly use content creation apps like Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, Macromedia Dreamweaver, or Flash, the P4 is clearly the fastest Windows platform.
HOW DOES IT compare to what is arguably the most popular platform for these types of tasks, Apple's Power Mac? This question is a little harder to answer, since there are virtually no cross-platform benchmarks to accurately measure performance.
But as it turns out, our reviews team recently did a hands-on with the fastest Power Mac on the market, equipped with dual 1GHz PowerPC G4 processors. Though it's obviously the fastest Power Mac yet, it's interesting to look at what you get compared with a high-end PC. The system's P133 SDRAM, 80GB hard drive, 64MB Nvidia GeForce4 MX video card, and not-so-SuperDrive all look pretty pedestrian next to the Dimension 8200 and Pavilion 950, yet the Power Mac costs $3,000 without a monitor.
No matter how you look at Northwood, it's tough to deny that Intel is currently producing the fastest, most powerful desktop computing architecture money can buy. We know that's not what you AMD or Apple lovers want to hear, but the numbers don't lie.
To all you Apple and AMD devotees: Are we missing something beyond the numbers? Why are your systems better than Intel-based ones? TalkBack to us below!
