Tabula Rasa: Six Boards for the Pentium 4

Conclusion: Pentium 4 Platforms Are Mature But Expensive

This test has made one thing very clear. Pentium 4 boards with Intel 850 are very reliable and ready to hit the mass market - once prices become more attractive. Unlike early products with VIA chipsets, the young Intel 850 chipset is precocious.

Intel used its rather bad experience with the 820 Camino debacle to improve the newcomer. There isn't much to prevent the Pentium 4 platform from being widely distributed by OEMs, particularly since Intel's pricing strategy is helping it to conquer more and more of the market.

A word more about the Pentium 4 motherboards: Boards with an Intel 850 chipset are anything but cheap. On average, they cost about $220, making them slightly more expensive than boards with DDR-SDRAM support for Socket 462, which cost between $200 and $220. Amongst the Pentium 4 series, the best value right now is offered by a Pentium 4 1.3 GHz "in a box" including RDRAM, heatsink and fan.

Overclocking a Pentium 4 processor from 1300 MHz to 1500 MHz provides the best value, but poses the problem of system instability due to memory and AGP/PCI bus overclocking. How does it work? The processors bus clock is increased from 100 MHz (100 MHz x 13 = 1300 MHz) to 115 MHz (115 x 13 = 1500 MHz). Please bear in mind that this also increases the memory, AGP and PCI clock (memory = 460 MHz, AGP = 83 MHz, PCI = 41,7 MHz) by 15%, which causes problems with several PCI-devices and increases the risk of system failures.