Tabula Rasa: Six Boards for the Pentium 4

Pentium 4 Ready For The Mass Market?

For the last six months, the processor manufacturer Intel has given the impression that it has completely left the field in favor of its archrival AMD. Its fastest CPU, the Intel Pentium III, was only available up to 1000 MHz when AMD had had its 1200 MHz model on the market for quite some time already. Now AMD has some of its 1300 MHz and 1333 MHz Athlon models at CeBIT - and more versions up to 1533 MHz are set to appear soon.

Intel tries everything to push Pentium 4. If you take a glance at current price lists for OEMs - an Intel Pentium 4 1.3 GHz bundled with 128 MB rambus memory and a CPU fan costs a mere $272 plus tax when ordered in bulk. Although this price won't be passed on to retail vendors too soon, it might be worth thinking about this CPU again.

So, let's take a first look at the boards:

Unlike the standard boards based on Socket 370 (Pentium III/Celeron) and Socket 462 (Athlon/Duron), every board using Socket 423 comes with an additional power connector.

View of a standard Pentium 4 board with a large cooler.