Intel Pentium 4 1.7 GHz: More Power For Less Money

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Test Setup

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Header Cell - Column 0	Pentium 4 System	Athlon System
Motherboard	Asus P4T, Bios 1005 beta 1	MSI MS-6341, pre-release BIOS
Memory	256 MB Samsung PC800 RDRAM	256 MB Mircron PC2100 DDR-SDRAM, CL2, Setting 8-8-5-2-2-2-2
Hard Drive	IBM DTLA 307030, 30 GB, 7200 RPM, ATA100, FAT32 (Win98) / NTFS (Win2k)
Network Card	NetGear FA310TX
Graphics Card	NVIDIA GeForce 2 Ultra Reference Card, Driver 667 (Win98/Win2k)
Power Supply	400 W
Operating System	Windows 98 SE / Windows 2000 Professional Service Pack 1
Desktop Screen Resolution	1024x768x16x85
Quake 3 Arena	Retail Version
Unreal Tournament	4.28
Evolva	Demo
Dronez	Demo
MDK2	Demo
Mercedes Benz Truck Racing	Demo
Flask MPEG	5.94, DivX 3.11

Due to time constraints as well as system stability considerations I did not include any test runs of overclocked Pentium 4 1.7 GHz processors. I simply dislike the fact that you have to run processor bus clock, memory clock, AGP-clock as well as PCI-clock out of spec to get Pentium 4 to higher core clock speeds. Overclocked memory, as well as out-of-spec operating AGP and PCI-buses pose a significant stability threat to an overclocked Pentium 4 system. This is a big pity, since Pentium 4 would otherwise have big potential to reach rather high core clocks. Owners of AMD's Athlon and Duron processors are in a much better situation, because they neither have to run processor bus or system memory out of spec, nor do they need to overclock the AGP or PCI-bus to reach higher processor core clocks.